Bruce Zeller oral history transcript

1233.pdf
[0.20 MB]
Link will provide options to open or save document.

File Format:

Adobe Reader

1
Oral History Cover Sheet
Name: Bruce Zeller
Date of Interview: August 23, 2004
Location of Interview: Desert National Wildlife Refuge, Nevada
Interviewer:
Approximate years worked for Fish and Wildlife Service: 27+ (at time of interview)
Offices and Field Stations Worked, Positions Held: Refuge Biologist, Desert National Wildlife Refuge
Most Important Projects: Bighorn Sheep reintroduction; building water retention wells/systems for sheep
Colleagues and Mentors: Bob Fields; Bob Yoder; Dave Brown
Brief Summary of Interview: growing up on a farm in Nebraska; going to school; summers w/Izzak Walton League internships; accepting full-time federal employment w/Corps of Engineers; going into the Army when unable to find other federal employment after school; work with plague vectors during Army career; transferring to FWS after Corps of Engineers; variety of work/jobs done on refuges w/small staff. Relocations of bighorn sheep, building water retention wells/ponds; bighorn biology; building relationships with and working w/other federal agencies, state agencies, NGOs, and avocational environmental/conservation/hunting groups; benefits to wildlife of building water retentions and when/where not to build them; benefits of retaining some areas of total wilderness for recreation and wildlife preservation; constraints of time/danger/equipment needed for accomplishing tasks in area the size, remoteness, and as non-developed as Desert NWR; advice to beginning biologist and FWS; problems w/communications and other technologies impact (or lack thereof) on Desert NWR; impact on the resource from the pressures from upper management and Congress to open more areas/experiences to the public and the emphasis of documentation of such efforts being detrimental to the funding of actual resource management/improvement.
2
Bruce Zeller Tape #1 Side A
Interviewer – Today were doing an oral history with Bruce Zeller – that’s B R U C E Z E L L E R. At Desert National Wildlife Refuge in… near Las Vegas, Nevada. Okay, so how did you first get into the field of wildlife biology? Was it hunting, books, or some teacher that inspired you to do this?
Bruce Zeller – It was mainly the hunting and fishing aspect. I grew up on a farm. When I wasn’t helping my dad, or my grandpa, in the fields why, I was down on the river, either fishing or chasing squirrels, ‘til I graduated up to larger game. And so it was… primarily got interest through my hobby, on the farm ground there.
Interviewer – And where did you grow up?
Bruce Zeller – In a little town in central Nebraska. Ravenna is where I went to high school, which has a population of about 1400. But I went to country school up until eighth grade at a little town there, population about 10 in the city. And then all the rest of the kids were from the rural area and were bused in each day in the “K” through ninth grade.
Interviewer – So… through our talking last few days, I’ve learned some of these answers. Tell me a little bit about, you know, just how did you first enter the field of wildlife biology. You went to school and then went into the military, pretty much so you could get a job with Fish and Wildlife Service later. Does that sound kind of…?
Bruce Zeller – That’s correct.
Interviewer – And tell me about that.
Bruce Zeller – I’ll back up and start a little bit more on how I got pulled into the path of career biology, and then go into the area you were talking about. When I graduated from high school, I was gonna go to the University of Nebraska, and I wanted to… the major I had selected was wildlife. And, at that time, the Izaac Walton League was… had a program where they would take kids out of high school that were entering college in the wildlife field, and send them out for a summer between their senior year in high school and their freshman year in college, and let them work on a refuge. So I got selected for… I think… me and my twin brother, and one other kid in the state of Nebraska, got selected for these Izaac Walton positions. And I went to Lost Wood Refuge in North Dakota that summer and worked, before I ever got any formal training in wildlife. And then went on to the University there and took my wildlife courses. But I was still convinced, you know, that’s what I want to do. So then, each summer, between years in college, I worked on refuges. And then, even after I graduated, with permanent employment being so hard, I took seasonals after graduation. So I had a total of five seasonal positions. And was still getting no closer to permanent appointment than I was when I got out of high school. So, I 3
decided if you couldn’t lick ‘em it was time to join ‘em. So went to the Army and got my preference - my military preference - veterans preference I guess is what you call it. And then took the first, federal, full-time employment after that, which is a job with the Corps of Engineers, ‘cause I just wanted that permanent status. I knew that I could transfer back in. I had all the knowledge and skills to work for the Service. And got out of the Army and worked for the Corps of Engineers on the Mississippi for six eight months. And then transferred back out here – began my full time career.
Interviewer – Was there… you say that you knew you could get back into Service. Was there every any other thought of any other agency or wildlife biology job? Or did you [indecipherable] kinda say ‘well, it’s Fish and Wildlife Service.’
Bruce Zeller – No, you know, I got, you know, after my fifth seasonal and I had no permanent offers on the horizon there, before I went into the military, I decided, you know, there’s other agencies that have biologists, and I need to expand my efforts here. So I put in for… well, Soil Conservation Service – put in for some jobs there, because the Forest Service was just a tough as Fish and Wildlife at that time. I needed to pick an agency where there wasn’t quite so much competition. And I did put in for a resource oriented positions for the Soil Conservation Service, which is now called the Natural Resources Conservation Service. Back then it was the SCS. And it was kind of frustrating, because I went ahead and signed the paperwork to go to boot camp, and then I had a little three or four week delay there before I actually got shipped off to my boot camp, and then I did get some offers for interviews with SCS to interview for some positions. And it was too late, you know. When you sign your enlistment papers you’re committed, you know. You’re going for three years. There’s no backing out of that short of going AWOL. And that’s not going to do you any good. So… but, it… that was alright. I had a very good military career. I got signed up on a program in California where they were doing research on plague. And it was a guaranteed job with the Army. And so I went out there and went to work in this research lab. And I trapped ground squirrels for two years. Drew blood, collected ectoparasites, identified as to genus and species, and then shipped them back to Walter Reed in Washington. And they ground them up and put them in a media to test for the plague bacteria. And it was probably some of the… well, it was the most intensive research that I’ve done in my whole career. I have not done anything that detailed, working for the Service, as I did for the Army. And my supervisors were… they were either civilians in the Army, or else they were colonels with PhD in entomology, or some other related biological field. These weren’t academy graduates who were… knew nothing about biology, just were military oriented. They were scientists, and they were my supervisors.
Interviewer – That’s pretty fascinating. I didn’t… you know, I kinda thought, well, a stint in the military means… well, something totally unrelated to what you wanted to do.
Bruce Zeller – Yeah. 4
Interviewer – But I guess that was, you know, helped out you in some ways in this career, too.
Bruce Zeller – It did. And, at that time, I was married. I’m not any longer. And my wife was a teacher, and the kids were getting to her. And she got a similar job assignment in the same laboratory. She was a math major, so she went into their statistical department. So we went in as a husband-wife team. And we were able to stay in San Francisco for three years, have our own apartment. It was not much different than having a regular civilian job, other than you pulled guard duty on the weekends and stood inspection. But overall, you know, the military end of it wasn’t so intense that it made the job miserable.
Interviewer – That’s interesting. There’s a question here that says, how did you decided to focus on desert bighorn sheep. And I assume that came after you started working here.
Bruce Zeller – Yeah. But that kind of ties in to… really, my preferences, even before I came here. I had… my seasonal, of course, were in the Midwest. And they were all waterfowl areas. But my first love, when it comes to wildlife, is ungulates – big ungulates, you know – elk and deer and big horn sheep and stuff. And when I was at the Corps of Engineers, looking for a job to transfer out to, I wanted to go somewhere where I could work with big game, you know. And so… yeah. And then of course, I got here, and there’s big game. And I enjoyed it ‘cause it involved aerial surveys and horseback work and all that stuff. And then, as I continued to work with the desert bighorn why, then, you know, it became more and more fascinating the more you learned, you know. ‘Cause they are a unique species in terms of what we have in ungulate populations across the country, you know. They only occur in the southwestern United States. So, there is a uniqueness there that maybe white tail deer wouldn’t have, or elk, or antelope. Something that’s really broad ranging.
Interviewer – I think we kind of covered the… well, where did you work before the Fish and Wildlife Service? Is that something that…?
Bruce Zeller – I could… I guess I could list those places I worked seasonally. That first high school… year out of high school, I worked at Lost Wood, which is in North Dakota. Near the… fairly near the Canadian border. And then I went down to South Dakota to Lake Andreas… Refuge Wetland Management District. And then, in the summer of 1970, I went out to Crescent Lake, which is primarily a grasslands refuge in western Nebraska. And then I took a break, and worked at home on my uncle’s farm for a summer. and then, I went back and worked at… the next summer I went back and worked at Jay Clark Sawyer in North Dakota, for Bob Fields, who was terrific Refuge Manager, and has a quite a reputation as doing some outstanding work for the Service over the years. He was the Project Leader at Jay Clark Sawyer at that time. And then, I worked one more season at Benson, Minnesota, there at their wetlands district. And after leaving there, then, you know, it was enough seasonal work. I was married at that point. I needed a steady income and needed to do something, even if that required going in the military to get headed in that direction, you know, so…. 5
Interviewer – What did the Desert National Wildlife Refuge look like when you first arrived in the… was it late 1970s… 19…?
Bruce Zeller – Yeah, it’d be 1978. May of 1978. That’s… to me that’s the positive part of the story of my career. It… is… it looks pretty much today as it did in 1978. And I’ve read a lot of the old reports, as I’ve done research for different subjects, by reading back through the narratives, dating back to 1939, and it’s been one of the areas that’s been relatively untouched by man. There’s never been a big push to do it… economic reasons, logging, grazing, mining… has never been active industry here. Of course, we’ve had the military here since the early 40s, but, since that time, not that much has changed. They’ve continued to restrict their air to ground ordnance delivery to the lake playas over there, where there’s basically no vegetation, no wildlife, or anything. So, we’ve been able to preserve a significant chunk in southern Nevada as if it existed at the turn of the century, when the Mormon settlers first came here and saw it. And that can’t be said about the surrounding federal lands – the Lake Mead National Recreational Area, the Taube National Forest, the BLM lands. They’ve all got paved highways, subdivisions. Even the Park lands, you know, to cater to their constituency, have put in concessionaires and tourist paved tour loops. And their lands don’t look like they did at the turn of the century. Well, the Lake wasn’t there at the turn of the century. Lake Mead was built in the ‘30s. So even that Park does not resemble what it did when the Mormon settlers first saw the Colorado River, as it runs through southern Nevada, so…. So, that’s something that I feel good about. I’m not… I can’t be credited with that. I think that’s something the Service has done right. And personally, I’d like to see ‘em continue to leave it that way, you know. And don’t get too involved in catering to public use, and build a lot of paved tour routes, and photo blinds. And leave it aside as a primitive area, where the hardy people that have the pioneer spirit, can still go out and do their thing. The more civilized folks that want to recreate with cell phone coverage and GPS coverage, they can go to the developed lands, either to Lake Mead Recreation Area or Taube National Forest.
Interviewer – Kind of gets in this… this whole kind of modern movement, you know, with our big SUVs, we want to be able to access every single little stop with minimal effort. And… so, your idea is that, you’d kind of like to see… people do it the way they used to.
Bruce Zeller – Right. And I think, you know, the Service is pushed towards getting more public involvement, and support, so we get better funding from Congress, has been to bring the public out and let them enjoy our lands. And I think, in some instances, that’s the right thing to do. We have refuges where we can cater to that type of visitor that maybe is physically less qualified than others to go in the backcountry, and develop support by putting facilities out there. But in the case of this refuge, I wouldn’t… I don’t feel that’s the right direction to go. I think we can do it through off site… maybe even put up a… and there’s some strong discussion about that right now. Putting up a Visitor’s Center, right on the edge of our boundary. And do our environmental education and our building of a constituency basically off site. And before they 6
leave that facility, you know, then they’ll be told to recreate out there, it’s a little primitive, you know. And don’t go beyond this Visitor Center if you’re not equipped to handle it.
Interviewer – What was it like living on a refuge when you first started?
Bruce Zeller – For me it was it was great, you know. I grew up on a farm where, other than one house, I didn’t have any close neighbors. And to come back to a rural setting where I didn’t have neighbors, and I had a pasture with some stock in it, and it was just like… dying and going to heaven, you know. After being stuck in San Francisco, and the traffic for three years, and then back in Illinois… or Iowa… was between the Illinois and Iowa on the Mississippi River. But, towns of Moline and Davenport and… big cities for the Midwest. And I’m not a city boy. So, when I came here, living on the refuge was great. And the fact that I was the only person living here and I had responsibilities of, you know, mowing, and fixing sprinklers, and helping the maintenance man do that stuff, was nothing new to me. I’d done that all my life on the farm. I didn’t mind going out there in the evening and irrigating, or cutting the lawns, or whatever it required to make the operation run smoothly. Honestly, I view myself as a much better maintenance man than biology. I’ve just had some training and some work experience that allows me to do my biological assignments effectively. But instinctively, my breeding, is to do maintenance, you know, or run equipment, or grow things, you know. Being a farmer that’s… I would be a farmer. If I could have made a living farming I would have done that first. A good living – farming, you know. I like to till the soil and plant the crop. And in the fall go out and reap the harvest. And feel that satisfaction that comes from starting from front… something from seed and…. But, in my case, it wasn’t a realistic option. My dad had a small farm, and his advice, from as long as I can remember him giving advice, was to get to college - get an education - do something different. ‘Cause this is… there’s no future in farming on the small scale.
Interviewer – Do you think your experiences here, as a biologist, generally reflect some of the same experiences other biologists have, other refuges that started around the same time you did? Or is this, then again, different? You have more of these alternative responsibilities, like maintenance, because this was such a remote refuge? Or was it just a sign of the times?
Bruce Zeller – It was a sign of the times. But, even though I was doing a lot of other things besides biology, you know, helping with some of maintenance, and at that time, I had law enforcement credentials and I was spending a month in the fall… since we just had the sheep to take care of, I still had a surplus of time to do all the duties that were required of me to manage the sheep as well as take on these other things. Whereas, at other stations, where maybe you were doing a lot of different biological tasks, your time would have been watered down by maintenance, and you couldn’t have fulfilled your biological duties. In my case, where I could focus on the sheep, when I had free time, and then… when I was… had spare time, I could do the maintenance stuff. The maintenance didn’t detract from my sheep. And, actually, my experience, over the period of time were talking about - from the late ‘70s to the present – 2004, 7
I probably did way more hands on biology than any of my peers. Because, you’re coming into the age of NEPA, where people are spending a lot of time preparing environmental assessments. Other biologists were starting to get deeper into planning. Were spending a lot of their time preparing the North American Waterfowl Management Plan. And duties like that were more office, or interagency coordination. In my case, when I was doing sheep biology - I was doing hands on biology. I was flying surveys. I was building waterholes. I was out there sitting at trap sites; dropping nets on animals; putting radio collars on ‘em. And after that was completed, I was spending time tracking these same individuals down, and recording locations, and feeding habits, and landing patterns, and all this stuff. So, it would be it would really be unfair to say that, because I’ve done a lot of the things biology… non-biological things, that I didn’t still spend a heck of a lot of time working with sheep. And I had some good mentors. The biologist that worked with Fish and Game here had wrote… he’d just… when I got here, he’d just finished a four year study of big horn sheep. And I started flying surveys with him. And he taught me a… variable classification techniques, and kind of where to look, and, you know, what parts of the range were used more than others. So that, when he was gone and I had to go back and do the surveys on my own from the helicopter, I wasn’t starting from scratch. I had some pretty good clues to where I was going to find them sheep.
Interviewer – That’s a little dicey, working from….. So what… let’s talk about, you know, you said… we started talking about what it was like to live on the refuge back then and… let’s look at it from more of a… if it was primitive then, and has it changed now, and has the change been recent or only a few years after you started. Tell me about… just the whole chronology of living here on the refuge. And some of the things you had to do, that you don’t have to do now.
Bruce Zeller – I still basically do the same stuff now that I did in ‘78. I mean, it was all proposed for wilderness in 1974. And so that preceded my tenure here. And so when I got here, I was having to either go on foot or horseback up them canyons to inspect and repair those water developments. And, in 2004, I still have to go on foot or horseback to those same locations. And I guess things would have changed a lot for me the last two or three years. Since, all time prior to that, it was just me and the maintenance guy. And sometimes we didn’t have maintenance guy. Sometimes it was just me. But, in the last four or five years we’ve jumped into this arena where we’re out actively seeking partners. We’re doing more of an outreach effort. We’re trying to get into some offsite environmental education. We’ve got dollars coming in from some outside sources now, so the planning and the coordination is stepped up. But, in this five years that all this has occurred, we’ve finally got another person on staff. And so… and that person is now my supervisor. They’re the refuge manager. Where I was always refuge manager slash biologist. They’re refuge manager. And that’s been their burden to bare – to attend these meetings, to cross all the ‘t’s’ and dot all the ‘i’s’. So my job, you know, hasn’t changed. And I feel very blessed with that, you know. There’s not many people in their career that don’t get drug into this whirlwind affaire of politics, and meeting going, and budgeting, and… so far from any other aspirations when they were in college. I just been very fortunate, 8
you know, in that regard. I’m… since I’m kind of a fossil, you know, I hate to think that that’s the future of refuge management. That the people that come after me are going to have to do all these administrative tasks, and are not gonna be allowed the luxury of going to the field and doing some of what I consider the nut and bolt work. I think that’s gonna… I have this fear that that’ll happen, you know. That my replacement… because the burdens on the administrative staff are getting heavier and heavier, that they’re going to suck my replacement off as their assistant. And the sheep are going to suffer, you know. I’ve built a tremendous working relationship with the Nevada Department of Wildlife, and also our local volunteer group – the Fraternity of the Desert Bighorn. We work together as if we all wear the same hats. There’s no… nobody’s better than anybody else when it comes time to catch sheep, to translocate ‘em, or build a waterhole to give ‘em some summer moisture. We just work side by side – titles and agencies are meaningless. and if my replacement comes along, and he’s not allowed to interact with our sister agency and these nonprofit groups like that, and some of the water holes and the sheep monitoring go down, then them people are not going to have… they’re not going to be as willing to work with us – or support us – however you want to say it – as they have been over my career. Because we’ve just all believed the sheep was the most important thing. and we, as a group, if we put our heads together, we could get it done. But if we bail from that group, we could lose some strong support, and maybe lose some resources. ‘Cause we’re not doing as good a job of managing. Or worrying too much about the administrative stuff, or the things that are important to upper management – catering to our Congressional Aides, and all that stuff. Instead of the resource.
Interviewer – That’s very interesting. It’s kind of like the… maybe you should talk about that. I mean, pretty much the Fraternity of the Desert Bighorn, they work to protect the sheep and to keep their numbers up. But they’re also a hunting group, right? And that… there’s a lot of folks that, I think, aren’t coming from a hunting background anymore, that are in biology. And might see that as a… kind of an opposite of what the biologists [have] done on refuge… should be doing in the future. So it’s interesting that… but, in that realm of what they might consider, is that, for the sheep, the sheep may end up suffering, because they’re going and doing paperwork, instead of being out with this hunting fraternity… or that’s… you know, that’s kind of working for the sheep’s benefit.
Bruce Zeller – Right.
Interviewer – See where I’m going on this?
Bruce Zeller – Yeah, I do. And I can understand why, from the outside looking in, that’s… that’s the view you would have. But if you… and there are hunters is the group, but you’ve got to remember, hunting sheep is basically a once in a lifetime experience. So, this core of people that work very hard, either shot a sheep 25 years ago… But they have so much respect for this species, they’ve continued to work, knowing that they’re not going to get another tag. I mean, they’re not even eligible to apply for another tag for ten years after they harvest a ram. And it 9
took me 25 years to draw my first tag. So, roughly from the time you kill a sheep to the time you may get to go hunting again, might be 35 years. But in that 35 year period, they’re they’re working their ass off – really not for another tag, ‘cause that’s not a realistic goal. It’s just for their belief, and it’s such an extremely valuable resource. And whatever they can do to better its chances to maintain its existence, or increase, they’re willing to provide all the muscle and manpower that they can muster to make it better. And it’s not your NRA type, real politically oriented group. They’re more into… they are as much into the biology part of it as they are the hunting. I mean, they want to be called up when we’re doing trapping and transplant, ‘cause they want to help with that. And they want to help with the water projects. And they’ll go and testify in front of the Commission, you know, to…. And they may go testify to lower tag quotas. Because they feel like, well, they’ve been hiking around in that area where they built their waters, and there aren’t that many sheep there. They could very well go in front of the State Game Commission and testify ‘that’s too many tags. I’ve been working in there, building water, trying to rebuild that population. I don’t want you harvest at that level yet. ‘Til we get our work done.’ They’re not your typical hunter group. They’re more critter oriented than they are harvest oriented. And their membership has some people that have been honored at the state level, actually the national level, for their conservation work. The Foundation For North American Wild Sheep – tremendous organization – they have… Well, you help me with this… he hiked all over the northwest, was a famous videographer. He was a hunter, but his livelihood was making videos.
Interviewer – Not Marty Stouffer?
Bruce Zeller – No. Well, he’s got a… oh gosh….
Interviewer – Had a [indecipherable] show or something?
Bruce Zeller – No. He was like… his name’s like Kodak or… but, anyway, there’s an award named in his honor that the Foundation for North American Sheep gives out each year. And Ed Prible, one of the founding fathers of this organization, he was the first one ever to get that award - the National Conservation Award for Wild Sheep. Umm. So… and Nevada’s a small state. When I came here there was 300,000 people in the valley. Now there’s a million and a half. But when my friends that were in this club lived in Las Vegas, there was one high school. And they went to school as classmates with people like Harry Reid, and Gibbons. They can call those people and talk to them like you and I are talking right now… and get some action out here at the Congressional level. And I don’t think… and of course, the group of people I’m talking about, in the club and at Congress, are both getting up in years. We’re talking people in their mid 60s to their early 70s, in this little local club, in the near future won’t have the political clout that it does now. And they don’t pull that much string very often. I think I’ve seen ‘em pull it like once in the 15, 20 years I’ve been involved with ‘em. But, push come to shove, they can… they still have that connection, because they date back to when we were a small state. And our senators come from that time period, when it was a small state, and everybody knew everybody 10
else. And I would hate to see management, either at the upper level locally, or at even the Washington level, abuse some of the things that we’ve done cooperatively within the past. Because, they may think their just dealing with… many of these people are just mechanics or sheetrockers, but they still went to high school with people that have power, and they come back to haunt ‘em. They really could. In fact, I had this conversation yesterday with a friend of mine. ‘Cause that’s one of the things I get when I’m retirement… they always want to… they know I’m retiring, and they’ve enjoyed working with me, and they have two questions: “what are you going to do when you retire?” And I tell ‘em I’m going to my farm in Nebraska. And the second question is “who’s going to replace you? And are they gonna work with us?” And I can’t… I don’t know quite how to answer that, ‘cause I can’t predict the future. And, it’s a little scary. And the person they select to replace me may melt in and work as a partnership with ‘em, and they may not. And I hope they do.
[Break in taping?]
Bruce Zeller – Work as accountants or something, and they’re never exposed to field level wildlife biology. Just something they saw on Disney channel… Bambi… and they thought, ‘you know, I’d like to work with deer in my career.’ So, they choose wildlife. But they have no firsthand knowledge of the land, or living off the land, or…. Their conception of biology is totally different than someone coming from a rural background. You know. And, for me, a harvest is no different… no different for me shooting a sheep and grinding him up and make sausage, that is no different than going out to our hog lot and hitting a gelt between the eyes with a sledgehammer, and taken him in and grinding him up and make breakfast sausage out it. To me, we’re just… we’re omnivorous people. We eat meat and vegetable matter. And it’s just something that happens, so that I can survive. That I can get my nourishment to get out and do work the next day. Death… something dies so something else can live. But, that’s not the mindset of much of society today, you know. We’ve all had this preservation, rather than this conservation, philosophy, you know. I think we should conserve. But, you can’t stop wildlife. That’s a concept that’s gone… that’s been lost. I mean, we can stop hunting tomorrow. But that sheep that’s ten years old is not going to be here next year. He’s dying. We can’t stockpile wildlife and carry it on for the next decade. It’s a renewable resource. We can’t stockpile it for future generations. We can use it – before we lose it. Or we can just let it be lost. And… I think you have to be very conservative on your harvest strategies today. Because it can come back and bite you. you know, if you’re out there harvesting at what you consider the maximum level, and then you have a population decline, somebody who is anti-hunting has got a pretty good lever to then say ‘hey, maybe you were right on the edge there and you were part of the problem.’ But as long as you approach your harvest programs from a conservative standpoint, I think hunting, as a recreation, will always be defensible. In terms of biology. It may not be in terms of politically. When you get into the emotional arena, you know. That part… whether it’s ethical or it’s unethical. That’s not for me to decide. It’s only for me to decide whether the resource can tolerate it or not. Not whether harvest is ethical or unethical. ‘Course I believe its ethical. But, 11
that’s… you know, were all entitled to our opinions. It’s America. That’s why we like living here. [Laughs] I don’t argue with anti-hunters. I just try and explain where I’m coming from, and I’ll listen to what they… and we can agree to disagree, you know. [Laughs]
Interviewer – What was your first task, as a biologists, here at Desert NWR?
Bruce Zeller – The first major task was to….
Interviewer – Let me stop ya. I’ll ask that question again and see….
End of Tape 1
Start of Tape 2
Interviewer – Alright, we are down to like….
Bruce Zeller – What was the first task…
Interviewer – What was the first task as, you, as a biologist, here…?
Bruce Zeller – I… as I remember, the first major task I had was to go out and get with the state biologist, the guy that I was mentioning was a good mentor - Bob McQuivey, who’d just finished writing that… writing up the results of his four year research on desert bighorn… was to go out with him and to set up some trap at [indecipherable] Spring, and try to make some captures for the state, that they were going to take the animals to another area of Nevada that they were trying to repopulate . And so I spent the most of that first summer setting up the trap, and monitoring it. And, as luck would have it, we didn’t capture any animals. We never could get a big enough group to come in at one time to justify closing… at that time it was a corral affair, wasn’t a drop net… of closing the gate. ‘Cause we were way down in this kinda isolated canyon that had an old jeep trail down it, to haul two animals out, all the way to central Nevada. We were trying to get a… and that’s not the way to capture sheep for relocation anyway. You want a group of ten or more, at least, to release, so that they’ll stay together and help each other survive and produce offspring. You don’t want to relocate animals one at a time, ‘cause… take one up there this month and one up next month… well, they may not even see each other for a year, if the first one took off and went to the other end of the mountain range, you know. You’re trying to take somewhat of a social animal as a group, and take it from one area to another area and… anyway… and release ‘em that way. And that was pretty much my first task. Other than just begin to start to go out and do the waterhole maintenance stuff on foot and horseback.
Interviewer – That must have been really fun though. I mean, to know that… I think… the West is so idealized, with the cowboy and the Indian, and then to get a job where part of it was to be allowed… and necessary, to ride a horse or a mule out into the backcountry… I mean, did you just think you had…? 12
Bruce Zeller – Well, yeah, it was really neat. To actually be able to do the things that… that you either saw in a western movie or as you visualized people doing man… wildlife management in the West. ‘Cause, as you said earlier, a lot of the people who were hired at that time frame, they came West, but they didn’t actually have a Western career experience. They didn’t do anything different out here than they would have done on the east coast. They went to public meetings, or they flew waterfowl surveys over a small, little, postage stamp marsh, that you could equate on the eastern seaboard. You know, they weren’t doing anything on the wide open spaces and the mountains of the West. They weren’t. They were doing the same things on the West Coast in the valleys, that they would have been doing East Coast in the valleys. Any experience they had in the mountains on horseback or wide open terrain, would have been done on their off-duty time, you know, on their vacation time. So, in that respect, I guess they gained something by transferring from an eastern refuge to a western refuge. As far as on the job experience -- majority of them probably didn’t get to do anything more exciting on the west coast job than they did on the east coast job.
Interviewer – What was that like, I mean, to get… I mean, you had kinda grown up and been in part of some big lands, in the Dakotas and Nebraska, but the vastness of this refuge… it’s 1.5 million acres. Am I correct on that?
Bruce Zeller – Yes, you are.
Interviewer – It’s a special experience trying to work, and trying to… you know, just get anything done, in this size land. ‘Cause you’re always traveling, I mean… I guess, if you could talk about some of the problems and challenges you’ve run into, in just trying to get this work done in such a vast area, that’s only equivalent to some of the lands in Alaska.
Bruce Zeller – Yeah. It… really it’s… it would… the size of it... I don’t know. I may have made it somewhat more challenging. You just have to have a lot more patience, you know. It’s not a case where you could go to the shop, and gather up your tools, and load them in the back of your truck, and run out a quarter mile and repair that fence. Come back in an hour later and tackle another task. You have to develop a lot of patience, you know. Your work site might take you three to four hours to get there. Depending on the site, that might require pulling the horse trailer for two hours, then riding for two hours. You’re going to get there. The… you’re just not going to get there right away. So we have to be little more perseverant, I guess would be a better work than patient. You got to persevere. And of course, you’re going to be dealing with some high temperatures, you know, if you’re doing this work in the summertime. It might be… once you get out of that air conditioned truck and start up that mountain with your backpack or your horse, it might be 110 degrees out. And… you just going to have to adjust, and keep doing it. But, like, that’s where someone from a rural background is not so intent… ‘Cause you’re used to working by yourself. You know, your father would send you out on a tractor to work all day by yourself. And it was your responsibility to assume that task, and accomplish it. So, to me, that wasn’t a big… wasn’t very scary. To be sent out for eight to 12 hour day by myself to do 13
something. You do that on the farm, all the time. I think people who work… and I’ve always… I like to work alone a lot, you know. ‘Cause I’m more focused on what I’m doing, and I’m not piddling around wasting time. I’m getting up there; getting the work done; getting back. Someone from a… that’s used to working in a group, probably would have been pretty intimidating to ‘em. And even though Nevada… the refuge is big, the way our geography lays out here - all our mountain range run north / south - and you really can’t hardly get lost. You can get a long ways from home. But your still gonna know where home is. Because it’s open. Once you get to the top of that mountain, your vision isn’t obscured with trees, for the most part. You’re gonna be able to look all the way to the valley. It might be ten miles away, but you’re gonna at least see the road that you come out on earlier that morning. And it’s gonna take you some time, but you can… you know, if you’re physically fit, you can make it back to that vehicle and you’re going to get home. You’re going to be hot and tired, but you’re gonna make it home. You know, in a way that’s a challenge. That makes your job more exciting. To be able to go to a site that remote, spend all the time getting there. Repair a broken pipeline, or… whatever the problem is, get it fixed, and then get back to your vehicle… home, and get that done. And it’s a real good feeling when you pull in at night. You may be hot and tired, but you fell like ‘damn, I done something today’, you know. Other than cross a ‘t’ or dot an ‘i’. I got something done today that may make a difference. Maybe that tank’s gonna get full, and it… when the temperatures getting worse, and them sheep come in, they’re gonna have something to drink. ‘Cause I went up there and I fixed it, you know. And you need… some people don’t have any sense of direction. I guess, if you were an urban person with a very poor sense of direction, the size of this area would certainly intimidate you. ‘Cause you still got to be able to orient a little bit without a… well, nowadays you don’t, because we all… our are college graduates are GPS trained. So, they’re gonna have their unit with em, and they’re gonna plug in their coordinates, or their track, and their coordinates of their destination. And they can use electronics to guide them. But I’ve never used GPS in my career to get where I’m going. I can pick up a topo and normally just glance at it and say yeah I go up this drainage, turn off at this side draw, then I want to wind up hill, and then I’ll find that water. ‘Cause I didn’t have anybody to show me where any of the waters were. There’s 34 springs on this refuge. Some are in obvious places -- at the end of a two track dirt road. But there’s… probably, at least 50 percent of ‘em, are up in some canyon in the sheep range, that you have to have at least some primitive navigation skills, or some intuitive ability to follow direction and contours, to locate that water. ‘Cause there’s no signs to any of them places. I mean, you’re traveling cross-country.
Interviewer – I’ve asked you about technology a few times, but then… I am kind of interested in… talk about phones, and when, and when you haven’t, had those here, in your career. And the other high tech communications.
Bruce Zeller – Okay. Yeah, that’s kind of an interesting area since… ‘Cause, when I moved here, we had… we had no dial phones. We just had an overhead line coming from the highway. And my phone number, when I lived in this residence where we’re doing the interview, was 14
Concrete #1. And then I moved into a different refuge later on in my career, and my number was Concrete #3. And we… and we only had three phones on the refuge. The office was 2; this quarters was 1; and the other quarters was 3. And everything was operator assisted. You had to… you picked up the receiver. It was kind of like the old days when you cranked the… thing on the side of the phone to ring the operator, you know, like they had to do on ‘Hee Haw’. Only, in this case, you didn’t have to crank it, you just picked it up, and the operator would eventually pick up on the other end. And then you’d have to verbally tell her the number you wanted, and where you were calling. And it really wasn’t… when the phones worked and they… a lot of times they didn’t, ‘cause that old line that was coming in off the highway was broke about 50 percent of the time. But when they worked, it… calling out wasn’t the problem. Because I would get a local operator and they’d normally handle calls from Corn Creek, and they’d put me through to the number I wanted. It was people trying to call you that went insane. Like, my parents were alive at that time, living in Nebraska, when I started my career. And they would try and call from a dial phone to Corn Creek. And they had to ring a Las Vegas operator. And then they had to tell that operator that their son was at ‘Toll Station Concrete #3’. Which was… they called it a ‘Toll Station’. They were at that ‘Toll Station’. And that operator had to ring that number before that connection was made. And it might take them hours to get through. And some [indecipherable] might get frustrating and give up. ‘Cause, if they got an operator who never heard of a ‘Toll’… Corn Creek #3…. And we and that system up… from about ’78… ay, my memory’s going, but about long about 1990. And then, at that time, we were approached by a cell phone company to put a tower out here and…. Which was probably a mistake, but we wanted phone service, so we agreed to allow them to put their tower out here if they would give us some cell coverage. So, since 1990, or shortly thereafter, we’ve had cell phones so… communicating with the outside world hasn’t been near as difficult. But, it wasn’t until about… it was after 2000 ‘til we actually got a land line. So, as you and everyone else knows, you can’t have an internet connection or computer service unless you’ve got a phone land…. Well, you can now, ‘cause they have satellite links for computers. But that’s relatively recent, too. Within the last four to five years… where it’s really a dependable technology. So, we didn’t get our first computer out here ‘til around 2000, or shortly thereafter. So I’ve not had to deal with email requests, and rapid turnarounds on computer generated exchanges of information, for most of my career, you know. Somebody that wanted something from me had to call me at Corn Creek #3 and tell me what they wanted. And I had to put it in the mail box and send it to ‘em. And, in a lot of ways, that was a good way of doing business, because you got to know people. You talked to ‘em -- on a not a face to face basis, but at least directly, you know, not electronically. And by the inflection of their voice or stuff, you could tell if they needed it quick, or didn’t need it quick. And you knew exactly what they wanted, because they were verbally relaying what they wanted. And I think we live in an age now, where people… they want their information and they want it instantaneously. And it reminds me of the old saying, you know, ‘poor planning on your part don’t constitute an emergency on mine’, you know. If you needed this information… don’t 15
email at me an hour before you need it. Call me a week ahead of time so I can gather the data, put it into a very presentable format, and get it back to you, you know, so,… [Laughs]
Interviewer – That’s very applicable.
Bruce Zeller – [Laughs] Yeah.
Interviewer – What was the wildlife strategy when you arrived at Desert? And how do you think it’s evolved over the years?
Bruce Zeller – The strategy then was… it was more or less just… when we got here… when I got here it was just mainly protecting the habitat. Because, we don’t have as much control over sheep habitat as, let’s say, you have over waterfowl habitat. Where you can regulate a lot of variables in a marsh to make that more attractive to the waterfowl. So, when I go here, it was more or less just a protection status, you know. Keep the vehicles out of the… on the roads. People -- don’t let em camp by the waterholes and stuff. Because, you know we can’t… there’s only a few things we could do to really improve habitat and conditions for sheep. And they weren’t doing ‘em then. They weren’t building water catchments, and they weren’t using fire. And you can’t create more space… or we couldn’t create more ledgy terrain. [Indecipherable] always been hands off, you know. We can make no more space out here. Or we can’t create more cover. You know. We… were not… we can’t create earthquakes to generate up-thrust to create escape terrain in the mountain. So we’re… out of the… you know, like all wildlife species, they need four things to survive: they need food, water, shelter / cover, and space. Well, the only ones we had any options are was forage and water. And when I got here we weren’t doing anything like that. But then, as I got involved with the Fraternity and stuff, we started building some waters. And was having some pretty good acceptance by the animals. We were getting sheep to use areas in the summer that, in previous times, they had to leave those areas and go back to a perennial spring somewhere, to summer, ‘cause there was no water in some of that lower terrain. Which is, in a lot of cases, that’s where the sheep prefer to be, is in that lower desert, shrub terrain, rather than up in that high timbered area that may have a higher water regime, and the spring source is located there. So, we got into the building waters. And had some good success. And some of our predecessors had tried to enhance habitat by doing water. But at that time they didn’t have helicopters. And they went out, and they built some guzzlers, or rainwater catchments, whichever terminology you prefer, at some low elevations along some roads and stuff. And the sheep wouldn’t use ‘em. So, it… when I got here, they’d basically discontinued that program. But then, I could see there was potential there. It just needed a little refinement… on filling the habitat equation of providing more water. And we started airlifting, and hauling stuff, a little higher up the mountain, and building water catchments. And even selecting a site where maybe you had a slick rock area, a real smooth washed area, with a pothole at the bottom of it. That maybe just ephemerally held water. But the sheep would know that. So, if you go out there, and there’s a natural rock pocket that in a good time would hold water, if you build a big facility there that will hold, you know, thousands 16
of gallons of water, your odds are gonna really jump up that sheep are going to find that facility, lock in on it, and use it, you know. And develop a little local population over you… off your rain catchments you built. And we did. We got… I’ve built 24 of em since I’ve been here. And I think I’ve got… one that I didn’t see a real positive response from the sheep. And our sheep populations have declined, even though we’ve built all these waters. But… and so, there’s some segments of the society that say ‘hey, you know, you haven’t done any good by expanding the availability of waterholes, as far as increasing your sheep population.’ But that’s unfair to say that, because there’s a lot of variables out there that has affected this population that I don’t have control over. Predation. Disease. Low lamb survival. Whatever the cause of that may be. Those are the factors that have caused the population to decline. And, in those areas where we have built our water catchments, and the sheep have came in and found it, and set up a little subpopulation there, then them are some of our best herds - remnant herds - that didn’t suffer the declines that the more traditional subpopulations have – that were centered off of natural springs, where they were in high timbered areas. Where visibility was limited. Those are the populations – on the natural waters, that have taken the biggest hit. The sheep mountain range… high estimates in the ‘80s for around 1600 to 2000 sheep. Almost half that population was on the sheep range, where all the natural waters are. That population has had a… has declined from the 1000, roughly, down to 200 animals. And that’s what… and we’ve… and where the natural waters are. These other ranges, where we’ve went in and added waters, they haven’t sustained the population declines that the sheep range have. So, I’m a believer in it. I think you can overdo it. I think a sheep is an animal that, on every mountain range it populates, it wants areas that it will use in the summer, and then it wants an area in the wintertime. I have to explain to you -- sheep don’t eat or drink …he only drinks about three months a year. And when they disperse from a waterhole, they should be able to go to an area that’s devoid of water. ‘Cause, if it’s devoid of water, then there’s been no sheep there earlier in the summer depleting the forage base. They’re going to an area that some… an animal like a mountain lion, that’s not as hardy as they are, can’t follow them into that dry country. ‘Cause they can’t go all winter without a drink. So, you need to have an area set aside in every mountain range that is sheep winter range. That’s devoid of water. That hasn’t been foraged on all year long. That’s incapable of supporting a lion population. Chances are its lower, so its snower free. So they don’t have to deal with the inclement weather in the winter time. So, I’m not a proponent of sprinkling water from one end of a mountain range to the other. I’m a proponent of going in there, where you have good… what appears to you good summer habitat, and developing water there, so you can build a population there. And expand on your total for the refuge. But yet, leaving certain sections of that mountain range devoid of water, for the reasons I just listed. And that’s a hard thing that we have with our sportsmen. They see the positive results of building water. ‘Hey, there’s lots of sheep there. So if we build more water, we’ll have more sheep. If we build more water, will lead us to have even more sheep. So then more sheep more sheep is a better – better - better thing. But they don’t look at the big picture, you know. You can have too… you can over populate an area. Then you can have a terrible population decline. You can have no escape area 17
from predators, ‘cause everywhere they go the wild predators have a water source. So we got to look at the big picture, you know. The whole life history of that animal. He didn’t grow up in an environment - a desert environment - where there’s water around every turn, in the mountain. He grew up in an environment where there was localized water sources, and then in other areas there wasn’t any. That’s the type of terrain, or habitat, he’s adapted to. And you’re just trying to mimic that. And by going in a totally dry area, you can mimic what occurs in a mountain range that had some water and some dry area. But you don’t want… I… and I you can get to ‘em. You just have to sit down like you and I are talking now, and explain, you know, kind of what the life cycle is. And flooding an area with water is not necessarily always a good thing.
Interviewer – I see.
Bruce Zeller – I kind of round-a-bouted that, but I think you understood what I said.
Interviewer – Yeah, totally. That taught me… I didn’t think about that.
Bruce Zeller – Assimilate what you’ve learned, and present it to your peers, or… I don’t know…
Interviewer – That’s good. I think you just said it.
Bruce Zeller – Yeah.
Interviewer – Yeah, how do you assimilate, you know, all the things that you’ve learned here… is this written down somewhere? Have you kind of a… I know, I saw you taking detailed notes the other day, you know, is that how you bring the data back and kind of… for future use and historical record…?
Bruce Zeller – Yeah. I’ve done a good job of keeping track of what we’ve done in terms of water development, and some of the use patterns that I’ve observed after we’ve completed the projects. And put that into our file system. So that my replacement can go back and look at that and see what worked or didn’t work. Or how well it worked, if it did work. And that’s the kind of information that hasn’t been shared that well with the academic community. I think that’s why we’re seeing a lot of push from some NGOs like the Wilderness Society, that are opposed to anything artificial out there. They’re saying, you know, ‘sheep have survived for centuries without man-made water catchments. Why is it so important that we do that now, and disturb the landscape?’ as a… me as a person, and desert biologist, desert sheep biologists as a whole, have not done a good job of taking the results of our water development, the positive aspect of it, putting it into a format, and got it out to the public – whether it be the Wilderness Society or anyone else – and strongly demonstrating what the benefits can be. Because, they only look at the historical records of sheep. And they see that there’s not that many more today than there was at the turn of the century. Even though we’ve all built these water catchments. So then, it appears, that they’ve made no difference. But of course, a lot of other things have happened in the last 100 years, besides water sources being piped off for mining, or urban development, or 18
whatever. So they had… a lot of water sources have made a definite impact, as far as maintaining populations in Nevada and Arizona and the other southwestern states. And we’ve not been doing a good job of convincing the folks that oppose that strategy of the positive aspects of that. And it’s always something that is just a personal pet peeve of mine. And I realize that were dwelling a lot on water, but, you know, you always… that’s why I like to say man-made water catchment rather than artificial water catchment. Because water’s not an artificial component of a habitat. Water is not like… methamphetamine, you know. Water occurs in nature. It’s a natural component out there. We may have artificially affected its distribution, or its availability, in terms of quantities of gallons available. But water is not an artificial component of wildlife habitat. There are very few species of wildlife that don’t require water as being a part of habitat component. It all goes back to water, food, shelter, and space, you know. Water is not an artificial component of that habitat. We may affect its availability or distribution, but it’s not an artificial resource. Water does occur naturally in every mountain range in the southwest. It just may not be as abundant, or as widely distributed. But it’s still there. And it’s required by the critters that inhabit that area. So I… I’m really a… my hair stands on edge when people use the word ‘artificial.’ I know it’s… they’re just grabbing an adjective out of the air when they do that. But it’s one of those… I don’t think it’s an appropriate, it’s a man-made… it’s not an artificial… water’s not artificial. And then, as far as, just to get back, as far as the other data – it does get shared, well, like, our survey data. All the southwestern states have banded together, since 1956, and… or thereabouts, and formed a group called the Desert Bighorn Sheep Council. And every year, since… in the ‘50’s, they’ve got together… biologist from Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, Texas, and assimilated all this survey data, from all the states, from the federal biologists and the state biologists. Put it together in a transaction form. So, the population data’s available there to establish the trends. The resource aspect, as far as capturing animals and relocating ‘em, whether those relocations were successful or unsuccessful. That was reported in the Desert Bighorn Councils. all the students that have done telemetry, sheep… telemetry work on desert bighorn sheep, the vast majority of them came to the Desert Bighorn Councils, and presented their findings from their research to the group, as a whole, and it was put in the Council transaction. So, you really… for desert sheep, it’s kind of unique. You don’t need to go on your internet site, if you were the new biologist here, and you had no experience working with desert sheep, and start researching what the critter requires – its life history and all that. Over in the office there’s the copies of the bighorn council transactions dating back to 1956. You start taking them home and reading ‘em. That information is there for you. I mean, it’s… as a species we’ve done a very good group collaboratively, between state and federal and nonprofit groups, getting together and assimilating that data.
Interviewer – You had talked a lot about the water and some of the controversy with… like the wilderness… strict… strict wilderness preservation standards, where the folks don’t want any alteration to a big habitat like that. Which is interesting, ‘cause it takes into account how big of a land mass were on. Because you really don’t have that in most other refuges, because they’re so 19
heavily managed. And some of them were never a wilderness resource to begin with. They were just a convenient spot. Now… I guess, how do you… what do you say to those folks who say, you know, this… since its proposed as wilderness, we shouldn’t have any of that on there. I mean, talk to me a little bit about that and kind of… I think it kind of… talk to me a little about your feelings on that, and the habitat issue, of why we put these water catchments in. And, like, the ethical issues. Go ahead.
Bruce Zeller – Yeah. That’s a good question. And, of course, my answer would be different to it than someone who was more of a wilderness oriented manager than myself. But, the way I answer the critics on that subject is, first of all, you’ve got to go back to the basics of refuge establishment. The refuge was established in 1936. And the purpose of the refuge, just as the Organic Act says, was the desert bighorn sheep. So our purpose and management should focus on those things that make that a more stable, secure population. That’s where the Service’s primary focus should be. Wilderness, to me, is a secondary objective. And it’s even hard for someone from a wilderness group to argue that point. That the area was established for sheep and we are going to do… I mean, if you’ve got hair enough to stand up in front of the group and say this, ‘we are going to take care of our sheep resource. Because that’s what we were established for. And then we’re… if we can improve this area by other means - by designating it as a wilderness and protecting other aspects of the ecology by doing that land designation - then we will do that as well. But our first and foremost priority is going to be managing the sheep. and then the second of all is that… the person who has a genuine interest in going into an area that is unaltered by man, and being in that area and having a true wilderness experience – where… still certainly has that capability. When you have 1.5 million acres, and I’ve got 25 water catchments out there… I’ve never done the math, but you figure… and these water catchments disturb an area roughly… let’s say 100 feet by 100 feet, when we build one. Twenty-four into a million and a half… there’s a 100 foot by 100 foot disturbed area in every 25 thousand acres of habitat out there. If that disrupts your wilderness experience, you had the very unfortunate experience to happen to stumble across the very canyon, or the very square foot of ground, that we went out and added water to enhance our sheep population. You shouldn’t have your wilderness experience altered - at all - by the work we’ve done. It’s more of a mindset. You… maybe the purist, he doesn’t even want to know that they’re out there. But, in terms of a physical disturbance to your experience, 25 100 by 100 foot sites on… and it’s actually a million point six acres now, since Clark County Conservation Act has passed… is not… should not, in my opinion, disturb your wilderness experience. Or should not have a very likelihood… very high likelihood of disturbing. And there’s different segments of your wilderness group. There are people who enjoy the wilderness experience and part of that experience is seeing the wildlife out there. ‘Cause it’s something they associate with the wilderness. That particularly part of wilderness purists might enjoy the fact they’re seeing sheep. And there was something man-made out there – they never saw it, but it enhanced their experience, because it added wildlife to the terrain they were going through. And then there’s another group that will tell you, you know, that the wildlife is… has… doesn’t add to the quality of my experience. I’m out there to see a 20
landscape that has no trails on it, no oil wells, no farm fields. Wildlife adds nothing to my experience. Well, my gut feeling is that the majority of people that enjoy a wilderness experience also enjoy wildlife in that habitat as they traverse it. And if what we’re doing out there is a pretty minor alteration, and it adds the wildlife component to their experience, it makes it more evaluable as a wilderness area – not less valuable.
Interviewer – What were some… what were the greatest challenges facing desert bighorns in the 1970’s? And what are those challenges today?
Bruce Zeller – Okay. In the ‘70’s, on the Refuge as a whole, we probably weren’t facing a great deal of challenge. We had relatively stable, high populations at that time. And, I think our challenge was to maintain that, that quality of habitat, you know. To not allow military activity to expand. To not allow public use to penetrate those areas that we were trying to set aside as sheep habitat. So I think our challenge was to maintain that. And I think we met that challenge alright. We were able to keep the area intact. It wasn’t started to spilt up for housing development or anything. We… the challenges we have today, I think, is that… is people are going to want to demand more access, more improved access. And now, with the growth of Las Vegas, and the water resources running out, they’re wanting to come out here, and drill our valleys, and pipe that water into Las Vegas – to support more business and more residential structures. And I think our challenge is to stop that. And also, a lot of our population decline is, in my opinion, is predator related on the sheep range. I didn’t think that initially, ‘cause if you read the literature, at least the stuff that was published early on, it pretty much indicated that lions did not prey heavily on sheep. That the deer was a primary prey base for those. but I think, as we saw some of the western deer herds decline in the 80’s, I think we saw some shift in predation patterns, on mountain lions. And, actually, shifts in their distributions as well. and the research that was conducted more recently has shown, pretty clearly now, that what we believed to be fact in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s – that lions weren’t a factor when it come to maintaining desert bighorn population viability – are. We’ve seen it in southern California, on the peninsular ranges. We’ve seen in the San Andres Range, in New Mexico. And I think we’ve seen it here in the Desert National Wildlife Range. After we experienced our declines, from the mid ‘80’s to the present time, we started doing a little reintroduction on the sheep range, thinking we could just possibly give it a shot in the arm and speed up that rebuilding process. And of course, those animals that we released there, we radio-collared a good sample. And I found that 50 percent of the mortalities of radio-collared sheep were due to mountain lions. Which was significant. Historically, mountain lion predation didn’t constitute that high of mortality factor. So I think it’s a challenge today getting over the… that hurdle. And it may [be] something that occurs naturally. I… the lions may eventually decline in their numbers, and the sheep expand theirs. And things go back to what they were in the mid ‘80’s, or prior to that time. But it’s a challenge not to go out there and do some control. I think you may reach a point, if things don’t turn around, you have to do it. Do some control. And I know that’s something that upper management doesn’t like to present to the public – that were gonna take the life of one animal for 21
the benefit of the other. Because people get upset when you talk about predator control. But, I think on a very selective basis, it may be something we have to do. You running low on tape?
End of Tape 2
Start of Tape 3
Interviewer – A people question for ya. Who were some of the more colorful refuge managers and, you know, any other personnel that you might have worked with at Desert? Any good people memories or things of that nature?
Bruce Zeller – I worked for some good managers early in my career – Bob Yoder, he was… had… was always colorful. He always thought it was easier to get forgiveness than it was permission, so…. Maybe it’s bad. I’ve kind of lived by that management strategy since I’ve been here. I haven’t gone out and announced at public meeting and stuff that we were gonna build a man-made water catchment up on the mountain range… or done a lot of paperwork. I could … my counterparts in the Division of Wildlife were doing it, having positive results, and I wanted to do it, and done it. I didn’t go out and ask permission to do it. I just done it. And I don’t… and I think I’ve had some good results. And it was good to manage by… easier to get forgiveness than it is permission sometimes. Now we have CCPs, and we’ve gone all into this planning phase, with public meetings. And we’ve been doing that for three years now. And we’re not any closer… much closer to getting our plan written, to me, than we were three years ago. And if we’d a had a problem that we wanted to address back in those days, that we knew the answer to, and went through the process that we are now, we never would have got out there and fixed that problem. We’d still be hashing in over. And Dave Brown. He was the Refuge Manager after Bob Yoder. And very hard working; very supportive; very good at keeping attuned to what was going on at all the different stations. Just an outstanding… in my opinion, just an outstanding manager. He’d worked in the field. I’m not exactly sure what his previous duty stations were, but he’d gone out of the refuges and went into the Regional Office, and was the Associate… Deputy Associate Manager, and had that regional experience. And then came back to the field to end his career. He was just so balanced. And such a hard worker, and supportive of what his staff was doing. And… just an outstanding manager. And, you know, when he went to work, he started at eight in the morning and he worked every minute of the day ‘til quitting time, you know. I’d watch him sit there at his desk and eat his lunch and continue to work through his lunch hour. and if you needed help, even with the paper stuff, why, you know, if you were trapping sheep or something, and you didn’t have time to write an inventory plan or something, and he had a little free time, he’d pick up a pencil and a pad of paper and start writing the [indecipherable] inventory plan, or whatever some other regional office or Washington office was saying was due. He’d help you, you know. If I was pouring concrete he’d come out and help me. But, yet, he had enough… a background, he could go back into the office and do the administrative stuff, too. Just an outstanding manager. I don’t know as I ever worked for anybody… or with anybody, that was really what I’d call a character, you know, one of these 22
really… guys that just tickles your humor, or does something just off the wall. Not since I’ve been here. Everybody’s just been pretty straight up, honest, hard working people. They didn’t have any personality qualities that made ‘em… kind of stand out in a crowd. I suppose… I’ve had… different people that I’ve met working here, you know, just some of guides, some of the stories they would tell, and some of their experiences was pretty interesting. But, I was hearing it secondhand. It was interesting to me, but it… to pass on in this interview it probably wouldn’t mean much to the next guy.
Interviewer – Alright. How have the… how have the neighbors and… you know, that’s a bad term…
Bruce Zeller – Yeah. [chuckles]
Interviewer – … residents of Las Vegas I guess, or whoever you consider to be a neighbor of the refuge, how have they viewed Desert over the years?
Bruce Zeller – It’s… the local community really isn’t all that aware of our existence. Our public profile, or image, is still really low. They still think Fish and Wildlife Service is no different than the BLM. I mean, it’s not uncommon, to this very day, to go out and talk to a visitor and they’ll ask you, you know, what’s out on this BLM land, or… you know, or to be called a ranger instead of a biologist, you know, the old Park Service terminology for someone who works with the resources. And our visitor use is still, in terms of what the population is in the valley, very low. So, our rate at which we’re spreading information about the Refuge or the Fish and Wildlife Service is far below the growth rate of the valley. And were trying to change that. we’ve hired a recreational planner, but that particular person hasn’t had the opportunity to go out and interface at the high school level, or the community level, and get our message out to the public, yet. And our visitor facility here isn’t the kind that… the little visitor contact station with a kiosk , isn’t the kind that would draw ‘em in so they could self educate themselves. And it’s definitely an area that we need to work at. I think we have to work at it smart. I don’t think we just want to go to town and advertise the fact that we’ve got this beautiful, untouched area out there, and tell everybody to fire up their dirt bikes and their SUVs and come out and see what we’ve got to offer. I think we want to bring people out and teach ‘em about the area… under controlled conditions that are suitable to getting the message out and preserving the habitat both. And it’s a challenge, you know. We’re dealing in the age where people want instant gratification. They don’t want to have to hike any distance to see a sheep. They want to be able to drive out, click their digital camera, gather that image immediately, and get back to town to their dvd player, or whatever electronic entertainment that they enjoy. Or go play a slot machine, or whatever. It’s a challenge, you know. We… were not… were dealing with a different cliental than we were… even 20 years ago, where a lot… a higher percentage of our public users came from an outdoor, hunting / fishing background, or a farming background. Or they were used to getting out working up a big sweat to accomplish their task. We don’t… were not dealing with quite the same the cliental that has that mentality anymore. They… shoot, 23
there’s a lot of folks could less if they ever saw a desert bighorn sheep. They might be very important to them, in terms of their peace of mind. They like to go to bed at night knowing that the wild animals are secure as they are when they go to bed in their own home. Because they think they’re one of God’s creatures, and they should be allowed to coexist. But so many of ‘em are perfectly content, even though they are concerned about the animal, learn from it from watching Discovery Channel, they don’t have to see it first hand to enjoy it. They just want to know it’s protected. And they want to know it’s out there in case they ever want to go out and see it, or when their grandkids want to see, it it’s still there. But to physically do it themselves is maybe not important to this generation and it was to previous generations.
Interviewer – What are you most proud of? From your 26 years working here? If you have something that you can even touch on for that. I know that….
Bruce Zeller – I think I’m most proud of the work – the hands on work, as a whole, that we’ve done. The water development. We’ve done some translocations of sheep. We’ve re-established sheep in the Spotted Mountain Range where there was no population when I got here. And now we have viable population over there. Some of the research findings – they were good results, but they weren’t pioneering stuff. Others had found similar result as a result of doing telemetry relocations. So, and again, of developing a good working relationship with what I call the serious outdoor community. And my partners at the federal level and the state level. Particularly the Nevada Department of Wildlife – the state level. We’ve always just worked very well together. I mean, I’ve had periods where I was doing surveys and I couldn’t get another staff person to fly with me, to record data. I could call them and they would come fly with me. And… or if I need somebody to help sling water materials to a water site, one of those guys would come and help me. And then, when they needed help, I helped them. I’ve flown all over southern Nevada, off the Refuge, on weekends, building water holes, and… out monitoring sheep populations ,and helping trap animals off the Refuge, you know. And lending what little expertise I had to the operation. And, you know… it’s… desert sheep in the southwest, it’s definitely one of those things, you know, you get out of it what you put into it. If you help other people, they’ll help you. And that’s happened, you know. I’ve helped them, and they’ve turned around and helped me. And I think the resource is better off for it. And I definitely want to see my replacement maintain them relationships, because the net result is the resource gets positive benefits. You know, two people working together can accomplish more than one person. And my efforts working with the NGOs, and the state folks, you know. I’ve got some pretty nice awards for that. And I’m not much of an award person. I don’t like to be the center of attention. But I will say, about the awards that I’ve got from the Fraternity, it’s more gratifying to get them from somebody who doesn’t even work with you, on a daily basis in the agency, than it is a Fish and Wildlife Service award. Because, sometimes in the Fish and Wildlife Service, it seems like, well, if you give one staff member an award, then maybe next year you award the other staff members. It’s just… sometimes they’re given to keep harmony. There may not be necessarily always given for outstanding work. But if you’re being recognized by your peers outside your 24
own agency, then, and that means to me, that they appreciate what you do and all your efforts and all that. Had a waterhole named after me – off the Refuge. And I recently received an award – the President’s Award – from the Fraternity, for 25 years of dedicated service to the desert bighorn sheep. And I can go to northern Nevada, where another NGO – the Nevada Bighorns Unlimited – and talk to their membership. And they’re… always want to thank me for what I do, for something that they care about. So, it’s been good. It’s good. Times have changed, and it’s time to go on, you know. But… I’ve no complaints.
Interviewer – That’s great. What was, or is, your greatest frustration? Maybe I should have said the other one first. I don’t want to get you high and then bring you down. [Laughs]
Bruce Zeller – Yeah. I… you know, my greatest frustrations have just really come in recent years. And that is that I realize that the agency, as a whole, is getting pressure from the top of the government – from the President, from Congress – to do a better job of getting our message out to the public. Doing outreach. Providing our elected officer’s constituents more services. And I agree with that. , we need to provide them with more outdoor recreational opportunity where we have the opportunity to do so. And more educational information, and everything. But in the process of doing that, now we have project leaders, and those in the regional offices, that are so attuned to Washington Fish and Wildlife Service requests, and Congressional requests, to maintain their quality step increases and everything that you get at that level of management, you’re having to bend over backwards to appease these demands for outreach and environmental education and expanded recreational opportunities. And were losing sight of what our original mission was. That, you know, we’re still here for the resource. Like the Organic Act says. That wildlife is number one. And that’s where our budget, and our time, at least the majority of our time, should go. And I don’t see that. I see maybe ten percent of the Fish and Wildlife Service’s effort going towards habitat, and actual physical habitat improvement. And inventory. And the other 90 percent is to provide information – whether it regards the other things I just mentioned, the outreach, or whether it’s just administrative information we’re providing to OMB, you know, where are our dollars going. The new A B C Program. The new Ideas Program. The new CCP planning process. SAMs program. I mean, we’ve got people, now, spending half the year just taking training so they’ll be able to implement, and the other 50 percent of the year, of these new programs. And I know we need to be responsive, you know, in terms of telling the public and Congress where were spending our dollars. But the process can’t become so cumbersome that you spend all your time recording the flow of money and justifying it, ‘til all the money is actually used on people to prepare the reports. None of it’s spent on materials, or actual habitat improvements. I’ve seen something come out of the… I don’t know whether it was a Refuge Directors email, or what, that they’d hired, like, 590 some new refuge employees. Or new Fish and Wildlife Service employees, over the last couple of years. And, like, 500 of them had gone to the field to do… I don’t think them numbers were pulled out of the… I don’t where they pulled them numbers out. I don’t see people out in the field doing habitat, or inventory… habitat management, or inventorying 25
species. I see people reporting to Congress; sitting in CCC planning meetings; meeting with the water districts; fighting over water resources. There’s just a handful of people that… still out there on the ground, actually trying to do the day to day operations, that we’ve done for all these years. And I don’t think we’re putting our money where our mouth is. I don’t think were being honest to Congress. I don’t think all them dollars are going for the resource. I think they’re going for writing new budget programs and teaching people how to run ‘em….
Interviewer – What advice would you give to other Fish and Wildlife Service biologists? I guess that means now on in the future.
Bruce Zeller – My advice – if you wanted to be a biologist, would be not to come… a field level biologist, not to go to work for this agency. That’d be my advice. It depends on your personality. If you’re more diversified person – you enjoy interacting with the public, during coordination meetings; you enjoy some time spent at the field level doing inventories; you enjoy some time on report preparation… environmental assessments. If you like that sort of type of work, where you’re diversified between the paperwork, the hands on, and everything in between – come to work for this agency. But if you’re… oh, our maintenance man uses the term all the time, if you’re a dinosaur, if you still just want to spent 90 percent of your time out there working either with the animals or the habitat, or even on stuff that directly supports inventories or habitat improvement, then I suggest you wouldn’t want to come to work for Fish And Wildlife Service. Because, we’re not an agency that’s headed in that direction. We’re an agency that headed in the direction of outsourcing that type of work. were so busy reporting our efforts to congress, or to upper management, and recording our day to day operations – on outreach budget expenditures, equipment maintenance, pubic use activity, and all this – all these fields unrelated to actual habitat or wildlife management. And you just wouldn’t want to come… you’re just… you’re not going to have the opportunity… I… the new biologist is not going to have the opportunity I did. He’s going to have all these other things thrown on his plate. And his supervisor expects him to clear his plate of those tasks. And once he does, then he’s going to have the opportunity to go out and do the things that he dreamed about when he was a college student. Well, by the time he clears the plate of all those tasks that he’s been assigned, his hours in the field are going to be damn limited... I mean… even the technology aspect of it, you know, now, where you’re doing GIS and those types of planning… electronic planning report, takes a lot of training and office time to generate that type of information, you know. GIS is wonderful, when all the data is plugged in and you have these layers of information out there, from vegetation to distribution of mammals, and distribution of birds, and recreational activities. It’s a wonder planning tool. But that GIS specialists… it’s very labor intensive for that person to go in there and actually input all that data and turn out a report… in a readable format. and I know were hiring people specifically to do that, but still, it takes time, on the biologists part, just to gather that information before he feeds it to the other person to synthesize. I would work for a state agency, you know, they’re still more of a… but even them, you know, they’re not exempt from it either. Their biologists are spending a lot of time in meetings and synthesizing their 26
budgets for next year’s funding, and all that stuff. It’s a sign of the times. We’re just becoming a more… I don’t know, not really more bureaucratic, were just becoming more accountable for actions. So we’re spending so much time inputting the information, or designing programs to input information into, so that we can be responsive to anybody that asks the question, you know.
Interviewer – Did you feel that… with the late bloom in technology itself on this refuge, and how isolated you were, do you think you were shielded from that push? I mean, it seems like a lot of that has been going on for a while but….
Bruce Zeller – You’re right, I was very much shielded from it. Because we didn’t have the phone line, and I couldn’t put a mapping program in there where I could type in lats and longs and coordinates and all that. I didn’t have to spend a lot of my time putting the data into an electronic format. I just… was a handwritten or typed format that was stuck in a file folder, and I could do that very quickly. And then go out and gather more data or…. Yeah, that’s true. Very true. I’ve been… actually we’ve been in that mode for quite a while, I’m just now being pulled into that mode – dragging and kicking, at the very terminus of my career. [Chuckles]
Interviewer – Have they been trying to get you into that for a while? You kinda used the… here’s how I’ve been doing it and it’s worked so far [indecipherable]
Bruce Zeller – Not so much that strategy. ‘Cause I could see the method to the madness, learning some of the techniques. Particularly like what I was dwelling on there - the GIS stuff. And I know they wanted to send me back to NCTC to go through GPS training to increase my skills, so that we could start plotting sheep locations and other data into a GIS format. We don’t have a GP… we can’t afford a good GPS unit right now, like a Trimble or something. And we don’t have the time to go out and carry the unit around and map out the boundaries of the certain vegetative type, or whatever layer of data that were trying to put in it. By the time I went there and got the training, and come back, I’d be retired. I mean, it’s a waste of my time to go there, get the training, and then come back and wait three or four years to get the equipment and the time that’s necessary to go out and do it. I’m better off, in that month, just staying here and doing things the old way, you know.
Interviewer – Also, if someone had to go, out on the ground, I don’t know if this is how you do it, I don’t know that much about GPS, or GIS, both of them, but, if you have to walk around and physically push that button every time to delineate vegetation and sheep and whatnot, this is 1.5 million acres.
Bruce Zeller – Right.
Interviewer – It seems like that would be an army of people doing that. 27
Bruce Zeller – That’s right. You actually need to have, not only the funding to get the personnel, but you need aircraft and all kinds of stuff. Like they’re doing on the fire program, when they have a burn, you know. They got the helicopter under contract, and they’re flying the perimeter of that burn with an on-board GPS unit. It’s not something that you can just, in an acreage this size, go out with a hand held unit, and map out all these different data layers. It… it’s… it won’t work.
Break in taping
Interviewer – I guess all the above.
Bruce Zeller – I think we’ve covered the bases pretty good.
Interviewer – Yeah.
Bruce Zeller – I don’t know. The only thing… there we were talking, as we come off the mountain today, about some of the tasks that we… some of the older personnel have done over the years, that maybe were… I don’t know… if unappreciated is the right word. I think our efforts have always been appreciated. I’ve always felt like they have been. Under-evaluated, in terms of the hazards, you know. When… historically a lot of areas have been blessed with very small staffs, and I am certainly not the only person in the Fish and Wildlife Service that has experienced where you had to fight fires one day, and run heavy equipment the next, and strap on you gun belt and go approach a visitor who wasn’t following the rules and guidelines, and maybe the fourth day get up in a helicopter and fly at low elevation –in mountainous terrain – and get bounced around like a ping pong ball – and hope you didn’t bounce off a cliff wall somewhere, you know. Personally, I don’t think that… because of the retirement system favoring just the fire personnel and the law enforcement personnel – because their jobs are hazardous, they get an added benefit in terms of percent of retirement, in terms of when they can leave. Being allowed to leave a little earlier in their career. I think, most of the people on these stations with small staffs have… they’ve done it ‘cause they enjoyed it. And I’d do it all again. But, in the process of doing it, they’ve kind of put their health and safety on the line a lot of times. And the Service has never really acknowledged that, you know. I’ve been in a helicopter crash. I’ve been on equipment that’s, you know, tipped up. Fortunately, didn’t tip over. I’ve had to approach refuge visitors who were drunk, or obnoxious when they had law enforcement authority to deal with, and that situation. And I don’t know as… we as jack-of-all-trades that have done that in our career, deserve maybe the same benefit that a fire or a full time LE person. But I think we’ve done a lot of things that you couldn’t ask just general members of the public to do, on a routine basis, and get ‘em to do it. We’ve had a cadre of people that were willing to put their all into doing a job, that was, at times, hazardous to our health and safety. And when we got invited, kinda by the Flirt Team, to put our applications in for [indecipherable – for 6C?] coverage, and the Service didn’t even really acknowledge that we even, potentially, had a valid claim, you know. They just started rubber stamping ‘em as, you know, as ‘reject’ ‘reject.’ I 28
thought it was handled very poorly. They could have denied our claims and done it in a less… offensive way. I don’t know. I don’t want to cry sour grapes, ‘cause I don’t feel like I’ve been abused at all in my career. I think I’ve been very fortunate to be allowed to do the things that I’ve done, and given that opportunity. And I’m not gonna criticize those that gave me that opportunity. I just… I think, there’s some areas they could have improved, but it wasn’t that big a deal. [chuckles]
Interviewer – Alright. Well, heck. Okay. And this has been August 23, 2004, the life and time of Bruce Zeller. Thank you, Bruce.
Bruce Zeller – [Laughs] You’re welcome.

Click tabs to swap between content that is broken into logical sections.

1
Oral History Cover Sheet
Name: Bruce Zeller
Date of Interview: August 23, 2004
Location of Interview: Desert National Wildlife Refuge, Nevada
Interviewer:
Approximate years worked for Fish and Wildlife Service: 27+ (at time of interview)
Offices and Field Stations Worked, Positions Held: Refuge Biologist, Desert National Wildlife Refuge
Most Important Projects: Bighorn Sheep reintroduction; building water retention wells/systems for sheep
Colleagues and Mentors: Bob Fields; Bob Yoder; Dave Brown
Brief Summary of Interview: growing up on a farm in Nebraska; going to school; summers w/Izzak Walton League internships; accepting full-time federal employment w/Corps of Engineers; going into the Army when unable to find other federal employment after school; work with plague vectors during Army career; transferring to FWS after Corps of Engineers; variety of work/jobs done on refuges w/small staff. Relocations of bighorn sheep, building water retention wells/ponds; bighorn biology; building relationships with and working w/other federal agencies, state agencies, NGOs, and avocational environmental/conservation/hunting groups; benefits to wildlife of building water retentions and when/where not to build them; benefits of retaining some areas of total wilderness for recreation and wildlife preservation; constraints of time/danger/equipment needed for accomplishing tasks in area the size, remoteness, and as non-developed as Desert NWR; advice to beginning biologist and FWS; problems w/communications and other technologies impact (or lack thereof) on Desert NWR; impact on the resource from the pressures from upper management and Congress to open more areas/experiences to the public and the emphasis of documentation of such efforts being detrimental to the funding of actual resource management/improvement.
2
Bruce Zeller Tape #1 Side A
Interviewer – Today were doing an oral history with Bruce Zeller – that’s B R U C E Z E L L E R. At Desert National Wildlife Refuge in… near Las Vegas, Nevada. Okay, so how did you first get into the field of wildlife biology? Was it hunting, books, or some teacher that inspired you to do this?
Bruce Zeller – It was mainly the hunting and fishing aspect. I grew up on a farm. When I wasn’t helping my dad, or my grandpa, in the fields why, I was down on the river, either fishing or chasing squirrels, ‘til I graduated up to larger game. And so it was… primarily got interest through my hobby, on the farm ground there.
Interviewer – And where did you grow up?
Bruce Zeller – In a little town in central Nebraska. Ravenna is where I went to high school, which has a population of about 1400. But I went to country school up until eighth grade at a little town there, population about 10 in the city. And then all the rest of the kids were from the rural area and were bused in each day in the “K” through ninth grade.
Interviewer – So… through our talking last few days, I’ve learned some of these answers. Tell me a little bit about, you know, just how did you first enter the field of wildlife biology. You went to school and then went into the military, pretty much so you could get a job with Fish and Wildlife Service later. Does that sound kind of…?
Bruce Zeller – That’s correct.
Interviewer – And tell me about that.
Bruce Zeller – I’ll back up and start a little bit more on how I got pulled into the path of career biology, and then go into the area you were talking about. When I graduated from high school, I was gonna go to the University of Nebraska, and I wanted to… the major I had selected was wildlife. And, at that time, the Izaac Walton League was… had a program where they would take kids out of high school that were entering college in the wildlife field, and send them out for a summer between their senior year in high school and their freshman year in college, and let them work on a refuge. So I got selected for… I think… me and my twin brother, and one other kid in the state of Nebraska, got selected for these Izaac Walton positions. And I went to Lost Wood Refuge in North Dakota that summer and worked, before I ever got any formal training in wildlife. And then went on to the University there and took my wildlife courses. But I was still convinced, you know, that’s what I want to do. So then, each summer, between years in college, I worked on refuges. And then, even after I graduated, with permanent employment being so hard, I took seasonals after graduation. So I had a total of five seasonal positions. And was still getting no closer to permanent appointment than I was when I got out of high school. So, I 3
decided if you couldn’t lick ‘em it was time to join ‘em. So went to the Army and got my preference - my military preference - veterans preference I guess is what you call it. And then took the first, federal, full-time employment after that, which is a job with the Corps of Engineers, ‘cause I just wanted that permanent status. I knew that I could transfer back in. I had all the knowledge and skills to work for the Service. And got out of the Army and worked for the Corps of Engineers on the Mississippi for six eight months. And then transferred back out here – began my full time career.
Interviewer – Was there… you say that you knew you could get back into Service. Was there every any other thought of any other agency or wildlife biology job? Or did you [indecipherable] kinda say ‘well, it’s Fish and Wildlife Service.’
Bruce Zeller – No, you know, I got, you know, after my fifth seasonal and I had no permanent offers on the horizon there, before I went into the military, I decided, you know, there’s other agencies that have biologists, and I need to expand my efforts here. So I put in for… well, Soil Conservation Service – put in for some jobs there, because the Forest Service was just a tough as Fish and Wildlife at that time. I needed to pick an agency where there wasn’t quite so much competition. And I did put in for a resource oriented positions for the Soil Conservation Service, which is now called the Natural Resources Conservation Service. Back then it was the SCS. And it was kind of frustrating, because I went ahead and signed the paperwork to go to boot camp, and then I had a little three or four week delay there before I actually got shipped off to my boot camp, and then I did get some offers for interviews with SCS to interview for some positions. And it was too late, you know. When you sign your enlistment papers you’re committed, you know. You’re going for three years. There’s no backing out of that short of going AWOL. And that’s not going to do you any good. So… but, it… that was alright. I had a very good military career. I got signed up on a program in California where they were doing research on plague. And it was a guaranteed job with the Army. And so I went out there and went to work in this research lab. And I trapped ground squirrels for two years. Drew blood, collected ectoparasites, identified as to genus and species, and then shipped them back to Walter Reed in Washington. And they ground them up and put them in a media to test for the plague bacteria. And it was probably some of the… well, it was the most intensive research that I’ve done in my whole career. I have not done anything that detailed, working for the Service, as I did for the Army. And my supervisors were… they were either civilians in the Army, or else they were colonels with PhD in entomology, or some other related biological field. These weren’t academy graduates who were… knew nothing about biology, just were military oriented. They were scientists, and they were my supervisors.
Interviewer – That’s pretty fascinating. I didn’t… you know, I kinda thought, well, a stint in the military means… well, something totally unrelated to what you wanted to do.
Bruce Zeller – Yeah. 4
Interviewer – But I guess that was, you know, helped out you in some ways in this career, too.
Bruce Zeller – It did. And, at that time, I was married. I’m not any longer. And my wife was a teacher, and the kids were getting to her. And she got a similar job assignment in the same laboratory. She was a math major, so she went into their statistical department. So we went in as a husband-wife team. And we were able to stay in San Francisco for three years, have our own apartment. It was not much different than having a regular civilian job, other than you pulled guard duty on the weekends and stood inspection. But overall, you know, the military end of it wasn’t so intense that it made the job miserable.
Interviewer – That’s interesting. There’s a question here that says, how did you decided to focus on desert bighorn sheep. And I assume that came after you started working here.
Bruce Zeller – Yeah. But that kind of ties in to… really, my preferences, even before I came here. I had… my seasonal, of course, were in the Midwest. And they were all waterfowl areas. But my first love, when it comes to wildlife, is ungulates – big ungulates, you know – elk and deer and big horn sheep and stuff. And when I was at the Corps of Engineers, looking for a job to transfer out to, I wanted to go somewhere where I could work with big game, you know. And so… yeah. And then of course, I got here, and there’s big game. And I enjoyed it ‘cause it involved aerial surveys and horseback work and all that stuff. And then, as I continued to work with the desert bighorn why, then, you know, it became more and more fascinating the more you learned, you know. ‘Cause they are a unique species in terms of what we have in ungulate populations across the country, you know. They only occur in the southwestern United States. So, there is a uniqueness there that maybe white tail deer wouldn’t have, or elk, or antelope. Something that’s really broad ranging.
Interviewer – I think we kind of covered the… well, where did you work before the Fish and Wildlife Service? Is that something that…?
Bruce Zeller – I could… I guess I could list those places I worked seasonally. That first high school… year out of high school, I worked at Lost Wood, which is in North Dakota. Near the… fairly near the Canadian border. And then I went down to South Dakota to Lake Andreas… Refuge Wetland Management District. And then, in the summer of 1970, I went out to Crescent Lake, which is primarily a grasslands refuge in western Nebraska. And then I took a break, and worked at home on my uncle’s farm for a summer. and then, I went back and worked at… the next summer I went back and worked at Jay Clark Sawyer in North Dakota, for Bob Fields, who was terrific Refuge Manager, and has a quite a reputation as doing some outstanding work for the Service over the years. He was the Project Leader at Jay Clark Sawyer at that time. And then, I worked one more season at Benson, Minnesota, there at their wetlands district. And after leaving there, then, you know, it was enough seasonal work. I was married at that point. I needed a steady income and needed to do something, even if that required going in the military to get headed in that direction, you know, so…. 5
Interviewer – What did the Desert National Wildlife Refuge look like when you first arrived in the… was it late 1970s… 19…?
Bruce Zeller – Yeah, it’d be 1978. May of 1978. That’s… to me that’s the positive part of the story of my career. It… is… it looks pretty much today as it did in 1978. And I’ve read a lot of the old reports, as I’ve done research for different subjects, by reading back through the narratives, dating back to 1939, and it’s been one of the areas that’s been relatively untouched by man. There’s never been a big push to do it… economic reasons, logging, grazing, mining… has never been active industry here. Of course, we’ve had the military here since the early 40s, but, since that time, not that much has changed. They’ve continued to restrict their air to ground ordnance delivery to the lake playas over there, where there’s basically no vegetation, no wildlife, or anything. So, we’ve been able to preserve a significant chunk in southern Nevada as if it existed at the turn of the century, when the Mormon settlers first came here and saw it. And that can’t be said about the surrounding federal lands – the Lake Mead National Recreational Area, the Taube National Forest, the BLM lands. They’ve all got paved highways, subdivisions. Even the Park lands, you know, to cater to their constituency, have put in concessionaires and tourist paved tour loops. And their lands don’t look like they did at the turn of the century. Well, the Lake wasn’t there at the turn of the century. Lake Mead was built in the ‘30s. So even that Park does not resemble what it did when the Mormon settlers first saw the Colorado River, as it runs through southern Nevada, so…. So, that’s something that I feel good about. I’m not… I can’t be credited with that. I think that’s something the Service has done right. And personally, I’d like to see ‘em continue to leave it that way, you know. And don’t get too involved in catering to public use, and build a lot of paved tour routes, and photo blinds. And leave it aside as a primitive area, where the hardy people that have the pioneer spirit, can still go out and do their thing. The more civilized folks that want to recreate with cell phone coverage and GPS coverage, they can go to the developed lands, either to Lake Mead Recreation Area or Taube National Forest.
Interviewer – Kind of gets in this… this whole kind of modern movement, you know, with our big SUVs, we want to be able to access every single little stop with minimal effort. And… so, your idea is that, you’d kind of like to see… people do it the way they used to.
Bruce Zeller – Right. And I think, you know, the Service is pushed towards getting more public involvement, and support, so we get better funding from Congress, has been to bring the public out and let them enjoy our lands. And I think, in some instances, that’s the right thing to do. We have refuges where we can cater to that type of visitor that maybe is physically less qualified than others to go in the backcountry, and develop support by putting facilities out there. But in the case of this refuge, I wouldn’t… I don’t feel that’s the right direction to go. I think we can do it through off site… maybe even put up a… and there’s some strong discussion about that right now. Putting up a Visitor’s Center, right on the edge of our boundary. And do our environmental education and our building of a constituency basically off site. And before they 6
leave that facility, you know, then they’ll be told to recreate out there, it’s a little primitive, you know. And don’t go beyond this Visitor Center if you’re not equipped to handle it.
Interviewer – What was it like living on a refuge when you first started?
Bruce Zeller – For me it was it was great, you know. I grew up on a farm where, other than one house, I didn’t have any close neighbors. And to come back to a rural setting where I didn’t have neighbors, and I had a pasture with some stock in it, and it was just like… dying and going to heaven, you know. After being stuck in San Francisco, and the traffic for three years, and then back in Illinois… or Iowa… was between the Illinois and Iowa on the Mississippi River. But, towns of Moline and Davenport and… big cities for the Midwest. And I’m not a city boy. So, when I came here, living on the refuge was great. And the fact that I was the only person living here and I had responsibilities of, you know, mowing, and fixing sprinklers, and helping the maintenance man do that stuff, was nothing new to me. I’d done that all my life on the farm. I didn’t mind going out there in the evening and irrigating, or cutting the lawns, or whatever it required to make the operation run smoothly. Honestly, I view myself as a much better maintenance man than biology. I’ve just had some training and some work experience that allows me to do my biological assignments effectively. But instinctively, my breeding, is to do maintenance, you know, or run equipment, or grow things, you know. Being a farmer that’s… I would be a farmer. If I could have made a living farming I would have done that first. A good living – farming, you know. I like to till the soil and plant the crop. And in the fall go out and reap the harvest. And feel that satisfaction that comes from starting from front… something from seed and…. But, in my case, it wasn’t a realistic option. My dad had a small farm, and his advice, from as long as I can remember him giving advice, was to get to college - get an education - do something different. ‘Cause this is… there’s no future in farming on the small scale.
Interviewer – Do you think your experiences here, as a biologist, generally reflect some of the same experiences other biologists have, other refuges that started around the same time you did? Or is this, then again, different? You have more of these alternative responsibilities, like maintenance, because this was such a remote refuge? Or was it just a sign of the times?
Bruce Zeller – It was a sign of the times. But, even though I was doing a lot of other things besides biology, you know, helping with some of maintenance, and at that time, I had law enforcement credentials and I was spending a month in the fall… since we just had the sheep to take care of, I still had a surplus of time to do all the duties that were required of me to manage the sheep as well as take on these other things. Whereas, at other stations, where maybe you were doing a lot of different biological tasks, your time would have been watered down by maintenance, and you couldn’t have fulfilled your biological duties. In my case, where I could focus on the sheep, when I had free time, and then… when I was… had spare time, I could do the maintenance stuff. The maintenance didn’t detract from my sheep. And, actually, my experience, over the period of time were talking about - from the late ‘70s to the present – 2004, 7
I probably did way more hands on biology than any of my peers. Because, you’re coming into the age of NEPA, where people are spending a lot of time preparing environmental assessments. Other biologists were starting to get deeper into planning. Were spending a lot of their time preparing the North American Waterfowl Management Plan. And duties like that were more office, or interagency coordination. In my case, when I was doing sheep biology - I was doing hands on biology. I was flying surveys. I was building waterholes. I was out there sitting at trap sites; dropping nets on animals; putting radio collars on ‘em. And after that was completed, I was spending time tracking these same individuals down, and recording locations, and feeding habits, and landing patterns, and all this stuff. So, it would be it would really be unfair to say that, because I’ve done a lot of the things biology… non-biological things, that I didn’t still spend a heck of a lot of time working with sheep. And I had some good mentors. The biologist that worked with Fish and Game here had wrote… he’d just… when I got here, he’d just finished a four year study of big horn sheep. And I started flying surveys with him. And he taught me a… variable classification techniques, and kind of where to look, and, you know, what parts of the range were used more than others. So that, when he was gone and I had to go back and do the surveys on my own from the helicopter, I wasn’t starting from scratch. I had some pretty good clues to where I was going to find them sheep.
Interviewer – That’s a little dicey, working from….. So what… let’s talk about, you know, you said… we started talking about what it was like to live on the refuge back then and… let’s look at it from more of a… if it was primitive then, and has it changed now, and has the change been recent or only a few years after you started. Tell me about… just the whole chronology of living here on the refuge. And some of the things you had to do, that you don’t have to do now.
Bruce Zeller – I still basically do the same stuff now that I did in ‘78. I mean, it was all proposed for wilderness in 1974. And so that preceded my tenure here. And so when I got here, I was having to either go on foot or horseback up them canyons to inspect and repair those water developments. And, in 2004, I still have to go on foot or horseback to those same locations. And I guess things would have changed a lot for me the last two or three years. Since, all time prior to that, it was just me and the maintenance guy. And sometimes we didn’t have maintenance guy. Sometimes it was just me. But, in the last four or five years we’ve jumped into this arena where we’re out actively seeking partners. We’re doing more of an outreach effort. We’re trying to get into some offsite environmental education. We’ve got dollars coming in from some outside sources now, so the planning and the coordination is stepped up. But, in this five years that all this has occurred, we’ve finally got another person on staff. And so… and that person is now my supervisor. They’re the refuge manager. Where I was always refuge manager slash biologist. They’re refuge manager. And that’s been their burden to bare – to attend these meetings, to cross all the ‘t’s’ and dot all the ‘i’s’. So my job, you know, hasn’t changed. And I feel very blessed with that, you know. There’s not many people in their career that don’t get drug into this whirlwind affaire of politics, and meeting going, and budgeting, and… so far from any other aspirations when they were in college. I just been very fortunate, 8
you know, in that regard. I’m… since I’m kind of a fossil, you know, I hate to think that that’s the future of refuge management. That the people that come after me are going to have to do all these administrative tasks, and are not gonna be allowed the luxury of going to the field and doing some of what I consider the nut and bolt work. I think that’s gonna… I have this fear that that’ll happen, you know. That my replacement… because the burdens on the administrative staff are getting heavier and heavier, that they’re going to suck my replacement off as their assistant. And the sheep are going to suffer, you know. I’ve built a tremendous working relationship with the Nevada Department of Wildlife, and also our local volunteer group – the Fraternity of the Desert Bighorn. We work together as if we all wear the same hats. There’s no… nobody’s better than anybody else when it comes time to catch sheep, to translocate ‘em, or build a waterhole to give ‘em some summer moisture. We just work side by side – titles and agencies are meaningless. and if my replacement comes along, and he’s not allowed to interact with our sister agency and these nonprofit groups like that, and some of the water holes and the sheep monitoring go down, then them people are not going to have… they’re not going to be as willing to work with us – or support us – however you want to say it – as they have been over my career. Because we’ve just all believed the sheep was the most important thing. and we, as a group, if we put our heads together, we could get it done. But if we bail from that group, we could lose some strong support, and maybe lose some resources. ‘Cause we’re not doing as good a job of managing. Or worrying too much about the administrative stuff, or the things that are important to upper management – catering to our Congressional Aides, and all that stuff. Instead of the resource.
Interviewer – That’s very interesting. It’s kind of like the… maybe you should talk about that. I mean, pretty much the Fraternity of the Desert Bighorn, they work to protect the sheep and to keep their numbers up. But they’re also a hunting group, right? And that… there’s a lot of folks that, I think, aren’t coming from a hunting background anymore, that are in biology. And might see that as a… kind of an opposite of what the biologists [have] done on refuge… should be doing in the future. So it’s interesting that… but, in that realm of what they might consider, is that, for the sheep, the sheep may end up suffering, because they’re going and doing paperwork, instead of being out with this hunting fraternity… or that’s… you know, that’s kind of working for the sheep’s benefit.
Bruce Zeller – Right.
Interviewer – See where I’m going on this?
Bruce Zeller – Yeah, I do. And I can understand why, from the outside looking in, that’s… that’s the view you would have. But if you… and there are hunters is the group, but you’ve got to remember, hunting sheep is basically a once in a lifetime experience. So, this core of people that work very hard, either shot a sheep 25 years ago… But they have so much respect for this species, they’ve continued to work, knowing that they’re not going to get another tag. I mean, they’re not even eligible to apply for another tag for ten years after they harvest a ram. And it 9
took me 25 years to draw my first tag. So, roughly from the time you kill a sheep to the time you may get to go hunting again, might be 35 years. But in that 35 year period, they’re they’re working their ass off – really not for another tag, ‘cause that’s not a realistic goal. It’s just for their belief, and it’s such an extremely valuable resource. And whatever they can do to better its chances to maintain its existence, or increase, they’re willing to provide all the muscle and manpower that they can muster to make it better. And it’s not your NRA type, real politically oriented group. They’re more into… they are as much into the biology part of it as they are the hunting. I mean, they want to be called up when we’re doing trapping and transplant, ‘cause they want to help with that. And they want to help with the water projects. And they’ll go and testify in front of the Commission, you know, to…. And they may go testify to lower tag quotas. Because they feel like, well, they’ve been hiking around in that area where they built their waters, and there aren’t that many sheep there. They could very well go in front of the State Game Commission and testify ‘that’s too many tags. I’ve been working in there, building water, trying to rebuild that population. I don’t want you harvest at that level yet. ‘Til we get our work done.’ They’re not your typical hunter group. They’re more critter oriented than they are harvest oriented. And their membership has some people that have been honored at the state level, actually the national level, for their conservation work. The Foundation For North American Wild Sheep – tremendous organization – they have… Well, you help me with this… he hiked all over the northwest, was a famous videographer. He was a hunter, but his livelihood was making videos.
Interviewer – Not Marty Stouffer?
Bruce Zeller – No. Well, he’s got a… oh gosh….
Interviewer – Had a [indecipherable] show or something?
Bruce Zeller – No. He was like… his name’s like Kodak or… but, anyway, there’s an award named in his honor that the Foundation for North American Sheep gives out each year. And Ed Prible, one of the founding fathers of this organization, he was the first one ever to get that award - the National Conservation Award for Wild Sheep. Umm. So… and Nevada’s a small state. When I came here there was 300,000 people in the valley. Now there’s a million and a half. But when my friends that were in this club lived in Las Vegas, there was one high school. And they went to school as classmates with people like Harry Reid, and Gibbons. They can call those people and talk to them like you and I are talking right now… and get some action out here at the Congressional level. And I don’t think… and of course, the group of people I’m talking about, in the club and at Congress, are both getting up in years. We’re talking people in their mid 60s to their early 70s, in this little local club, in the near future won’t have the political clout that it does now. And they don’t pull that much string very often. I think I’ve seen ‘em pull it like once in the 15, 20 years I’ve been involved with ‘em. But, push come to shove, they can… they still have that connection, because they date back to when we were a small state. And our senators come from that time period, when it was a small state, and everybody knew everybody 10
else. And I would hate to see management, either at the upper level locally, or at even the Washington level, abuse some of the things that we’ve done cooperatively within the past. Because, they may think their just dealing with… many of these people are just mechanics or sheetrockers, but they still went to high school with people that have power, and they come back to haunt ‘em. They really could. In fact, I had this conversation yesterday with a friend of mine. ‘Cause that’s one of the things I get when I’m retirement… they always want to… they know I’m retiring, and they’ve enjoyed working with me, and they have two questions: “what are you going to do when you retire?” And I tell ‘em I’m going to my farm in Nebraska. And the second question is “who’s going to replace you? And are they gonna work with us?” And I can’t… I don’t know quite how to answer that, ‘cause I can’t predict the future. And, it’s a little scary. And the person they select to replace me may melt in and work as a partnership with ‘em, and they may not. And I hope they do.
[Break in taping?]
Bruce Zeller – Work as accountants or something, and they’re never exposed to field level wildlife biology. Just something they saw on Disney channel… Bambi… and they thought, ‘you know, I’d like to work with deer in my career.’ So, they choose wildlife. But they have no firsthand knowledge of the land, or living off the land, or…. Their conception of biology is totally different than someone coming from a rural background. You know. And, for me, a harvest is no different… no different for me shooting a sheep and grinding him up and make sausage, that is no different than going out to our hog lot and hitting a gelt between the eyes with a sledgehammer, and taken him in and grinding him up and make breakfast sausage out it. To me, we’re just… we’re omnivorous people. We eat meat and vegetable matter. And it’s just something that happens, so that I can survive. That I can get my nourishment to get out and do work the next day. Death… something dies so something else can live. But, that’s not the mindset of much of society today, you know. We’ve all had this preservation, rather than this conservation, philosophy, you know. I think we should conserve. But, you can’t stop wildlife. That’s a concept that’s gone… that’s been lost. I mean, we can stop hunting tomorrow. But that sheep that’s ten years old is not going to be here next year. He’s dying. We can’t stockpile wildlife and carry it on for the next decade. It’s a renewable resource. We can’t stockpile it for future generations. We can use it – before we lose it. Or we can just let it be lost. And… I think you have to be very conservative on your harvest strategies today. Because it can come back and bite you. you know, if you’re out there harvesting at what you consider the maximum level, and then you have a population decline, somebody who is anti-hunting has got a pretty good lever to then say ‘hey, maybe you were right on the edge there and you were part of the problem.’ But as long as you approach your harvest programs from a conservative standpoint, I think hunting, as a recreation, will always be defensible. In terms of biology. It may not be in terms of politically. When you get into the emotional arena, you know. That part… whether it’s ethical or it’s unethical. That’s not for me to decide. It’s only for me to decide whether the resource can tolerate it or not. Not whether harvest is ethical or unethical. ‘Course I believe its ethical. But, 11
that’s… you know, were all entitled to our opinions. It’s America. That’s why we like living here. [Laughs] I don’t argue with anti-hunters. I just try and explain where I’m coming from, and I’ll listen to what they… and we can agree to disagree, you know. [Laughs]
Interviewer – What was your first task, as a biologists, here at Desert NWR?
Bruce Zeller – The first major task was to….
Interviewer – Let me stop ya. I’ll ask that question again and see….
End of Tape 1
Start of Tape 2
Interviewer – Alright, we are down to like….
Bruce Zeller – What was the first task…
Interviewer – What was the first task as, you, as a biologist, here…?
Bruce Zeller – I… as I remember, the first major task I had was to go out and get with the state biologist, the guy that I was mentioning was a good mentor - Bob McQuivey, who’d just finished writing that… writing up the results of his four year research on desert bighorn… was to go out with him and to set up some trap at [indecipherable] Spring, and try to make some captures for the state, that they were going to take the animals to another area of Nevada that they were trying to repopulate . And so I spent the most of that first summer setting up the trap, and monitoring it. And, as luck would have it, we didn’t capture any animals. We never could get a big enough group to come in at one time to justify closing… at that time it was a corral affair, wasn’t a drop net… of closing the gate. ‘Cause we were way down in this kinda isolated canyon that had an old jeep trail down it, to haul two animals out, all the way to central Nevada. We were trying to get a… and that’s not the way to capture sheep for relocation anyway. You want a group of ten or more, at least, to release, so that they’ll stay together and help each other survive and produce offspring. You don’t want to relocate animals one at a time, ‘cause… take one up there this month and one up next month… well, they may not even see each other for a year, if the first one took off and went to the other end of the mountain range, you know. You’re trying to take somewhat of a social animal as a group, and take it from one area to another area and… anyway… and release ‘em that way. And that was pretty much my first task. Other than just begin to start to go out and do the waterhole maintenance stuff on foot and horseback.
Interviewer – That must have been really fun though. I mean, to know that… I think… the West is so idealized, with the cowboy and the Indian, and then to get a job where part of it was to be allowed… and necessary, to ride a horse or a mule out into the backcountry… I mean, did you just think you had…? 12
Bruce Zeller – Well, yeah, it was really neat. To actually be able to do the things that… that you either saw in a western movie or as you visualized people doing man… wildlife management in the West. ‘Cause, as you said earlier, a lot of the people who were hired at that time frame, they came West, but they didn’t actually have a Western career experience. They didn’t do anything different out here than they would have done on the east coast. They went to public meetings, or they flew waterfowl surveys over a small, little, postage stamp marsh, that you could equate on the eastern seaboard. You know, they weren’t doing anything on the wide open spaces and the mountains of the West. They weren’t. They were doing the same things on the West Coast in the valleys, that they would have been doing East Coast in the valleys. Any experience they had in the mountains on horseback or wide open terrain, would have been done on their off-duty time, you know, on their vacation time. So, in that respect, I guess they gained something by transferring from an eastern refuge to a western refuge. As far as on the job experience -- majority of them probably didn’t get to do anything more exciting on the west coast job than they did on the east coast job.
Interviewer – What was that like, I mean, to get… I mean, you had kinda grown up and been in part of some big lands, in the Dakotas and Nebraska, but the vastness of this refuge… it’s 1.5 million acres. Am I correct on that?
Bruce Zeller – Yes, you are.
Interviewer – It’s a special experience trying to work, and trying to… you know, just get anything done, in this size land. ‘Cause you’re always traveling, I mean… I guess, if you could talk about some of the problems and challenges you’ve run into, in just trying to get this work done in such a vast area, that’s only equivalent to some of the lands in Alaska.
Bruce Zeller – Yeah. It… really it’s… it would… the size of it... I don’t know. I may have made it somewhat more challenging. You just have to have a lot more patience, you know. It’s not a case where you could go to the shop, and gather up your tools, and load them in the back of your truck, and run out a quarter mile and repair that fence. Come back in an hour later and tackle another task. You have to develop a lot of patience, you know. Your work site might take you three to four hours to get there. Depending on the site, that might require pulling the horse trailer for two hours, then riding for two hours. You’re going to get there. The… you’re just not going to get there right away. So we have to be little more perseverant, I guess would be a better work than patient. You got to persevere. And of course, you’re going to be dealing with some high temperatures, you know, if you’re doing this work in the summertime. It might be… once you get out of that air conditioned truck and start up that mountain with your backpack or your horse, it might be 110 degrees out. And… you just going to have to adjust, and keep doing it. But, like, that’s where someone from a rural background is not so intent… ‘Cause you’re used to working by yourself. You know, your father would send you out on a tractor to work all day by yourself. And it was your responsibility to assume that task, and accomplish it. So, to me, that wasn’t a big… wasn’t very scary. To be sent out for eight to 12 hour day by myself to do 13
something. You do that on the farm, all the time. I think people who work… and I’ve always… I like to work alone a lot, you know. ‘Cause I’m more focused on what I’m doing, and I’m not piddling around wasting time. I’m getting up there; getting the work done; getting back. Someone from a… that’s used to working in a group, probably would have been pretty intimidating to ‘em. And even though Nevada… the refuge is big, the way our geography lays out here - all our mountain range run north / south - and you really can’t hardly get lost. You can get a long ways from home. But your still gonna know where home is. Because it’s open. Once you get to the top of that mountain, your vision isn’t obscured with trees, for the most part. You’re gonna be able to look all the way to the valley. It might be ten miles away, but you’re gonna at least see the road that you come out on earlier that morning. And it’s gonna take you some time, but you can… you know, if you’re physically fit, you can make it back to that vehicle and you’re going to get home. You’re going to be hot and tired, but you’re gonna make it home. You know, in a way that’s a challenge. That makes your job more exciting. To be able to go to a site that remote, spend all the time getting there. Repair a broken pipeline, or… whatever the problem is, get it fixed, and then get back to your vehicle… home, and get that done. And it’s a real good feeling when you pull in at night. You may be hot and tired, but you fell like ‘damn, I done something today’, you know. Other than cross a ‘t’ or dot an ‘i’. I got something done today that may make a difference. Maybe that tank’s gonna get full, and it… when the temperatures getting worse, and them sheep come in, they’re gonna have something to drink. ‘Cause I went up there and I fixed it, you know. And you need… some people don’t have any sense of direction. I guess, if you were an urban person with a very poor sense of direction, the size of this area would certainly intimidate you. ‘Cause you still got to be able to orient a little bit without a… well, nowadays you don’t, because we all… our are college graduates are GPS trained. So, they’re gonna have their unit with em, and they’re gonna plug in their coordinates, or their track, and their coordinates of their destination. And they can use electronics to guide them. But I’ve never used GPS in my career to get where I’m going. I can pick up a topo and normally just glance at it and say yeah I go up this drainage, turn off at this side draw, then I want to wind up hill, and then I’ll find that water. ‘Cause I didn’t have anybody to show me where any of the waters were. There’s 34 springs on this refuge. Some are in obvious places -- at the end of a two track dirt road. But there’s… probably, at least 50 percent of ‘em, are up in some canyon in the sheep range, that you have to have at least some primitive navigation skills, or some intuitive ability to follow direction and contours, to locate that water. ‘Cause there’s no signs to any of them places. I mean, you’re traveling cross-country.
Interviewer – I’ve asked you about technology a few times, but then… I am kind of interested in… talk about phones, and when, and when you haven’t, had those here, in your career. And the other high tech communications.
Bruce Zeller – Okay. Yeah, that’s kind of an interesting area since… ‘Cause, when I moved here, we had… we had no dial phones. We just had an overhead line coming from the highway. And my phone number, when I lived in this residence where we’re doing the interview, was 14
Concrete #1. And then I moved into a different refuge later on in my career, and my number was Concrete #3. And we… and we only had three phones on the refuge. The office was 2; this quarters was 1; and the other quarters was 3. And everything was operator assisted. You had to… you picked up the receiver. It was kind of like the old days when you cranked the… thing on the side of the phone to ring the operator, you know, like they had to do on ‘Hee Haw’. Only, in this case, you didn’t have to crank it, you just picked it up, and the operator would eventually pick up on the other end. And then you’d have to verbally tell her the number you wanted, and where you were calling. And it really wasn’t… when the phones worked and they… a lot of times they didn’t, ‘cause that old line that was coming in off the highway was broke about 50 percent of the time. But when they worked, it… calling out wasn’t the problem. Because I would get a local operator and they’d normally handle calls from Corn Creek, and they’d put me through to the number I wanted. It was people trying to call you that went insane. Like, my parents were alive at that time, living in Nebraska, when I started my career. And they would try and call from a dial phone to Corn Creek. And they had to ring a Las Vegas operator. And then they had to tell that operator that their son was at ‘Toll Station Concrete #3’. Which was… they called it a ‘Toll Station’. They were at that ‘Toll Station’. And that operator had to ring that number before that connection was made. And it might take them hours to get through. And some [indecipherable] might get frustrating and give up. ‘Cause, if they got an operator who never heard of a ‘Toll’… Corn Creek #3…. And we and that system up… from about ’78… ay, my memory’s going, but about long about 1990. And then, at that time, we were approached by a cell phone company to put a tower out here and…. Which was probably a mistake, but we wanted phone service, so we agreed to allow them to put their tower out here if they would give us some cell coverage. So, since 1990, or shortly thereafter, we’ve had cell phones so… communicating with the outside world hasn’t been near as difficult. But, it wasn’t until about… it was after 2000 ‘til we actually got a land line. So, as you and everyone else knows, you can’t have an internet connection or computer service unless you’ve got a phone land…. Well, you can now, ‘cause they have satellite links for computers. But that’s relatively recent, too. Within the last four to five years… where it’s really a dependable technology. So, we didn’t get our first computer out here ‘til around 2000, or shortly thereafter. So I’ve not had to deal with email requests, and rapid turnarounds on computer generated exchanges of information, for most of my career, you know. Somebody that wanted something from me had to call me at Corn Creek #3 and tell me what they wanted. And I had to put it in the mail box and send it to ‘em. And, in a lot of ways, that was a good way of doing business, because you got to know people. You talked to ‘em -- on a not a face to face basis, but at least directly, you know, not electronically. And by the inflection of their voice or stuff, you could tell if they needed it quick, or didn’t need it quick. And you knew exactly what they wanted, because they were verbally relaying what they wanted. And I think we live in an age now, where people… they want their information and they want it instantaneously. And it reminds me of the old saying, you know, ‘poor planning on your part don’t constitute an emergency on mine’, you know. If you needed this information… don’t 15
email at me an hour before you need it. Call me a week ahead of time so I can gather the data, put it into a very presentable format, and get it back to you, you know, so,… [Laughs]
Interviewer – That’s very applicable.
Bruce Zeller – [Laughs] Yeah.
Interviewer – What was the wildlife strategy when you arrived at Desert? And how do you think it’s evolved over the years?
Bruce Zeller – The strategy then was… it was more or less just… when we got here… when I got here it was just mainly protecting the habitat. Because, we don’t have as much control over sheep habitat as, let’s say, you have over waterfowl habitat. Where you can regulate a lot of variables in a marsh to make that more attractive to the waterfowl. So, when I go here, it was more or less just a protection status, you know. Keep the vehicles out of the… on the roads. People -- don’t let em camp by the waterholes and stuff. Because, you know we can’t… there’s only a few things we could do to really improve habitat and conditions for sheep. And they weren’t doing ‘em then. They weren’t building water catchments, and they weren’t using fire. And you can’t create more space… or we couldn’t create more ledgy terrain. [Indecipherable] always been hands off, you know. We can make no more space out here. Or we can’t create more cover. You know. We… were not… we can’t create earthquakes to generate up-thrust to create escape terrain in the mountain. So we’re… out of the… you know, like all wildlife species, they need four things to survive: they need food, water, shelter / cover, and space. Well, the only ones we had any options are was forage and water. And when I got here we weren’t doing anything like that. But then, as I got involved with the Fraternity and stuff, we started building some waters. And was having some pretty good acceptance by the animals. We were getting sheep to use areas in the summer that, in previous times, they had to leave those areas and go back to a perennial spring somewhere, to summer, ‘cause there was no water in some of that lower terrain. Which is, in a lot of cases, that’s where the sheep prefer to be, is in that lower desert, shrub terrain, rather than up in that high timbered area that may have a higher water regime, and the spring source is located there. So, we got into the building waters. And had some good success. And some of our predecessors had tried to enhance habitat by doing water. But at that time they didn’t have helicopters. And they went out, and they built some guzzlers, or rainwater catchments, whichever terminology you prefer, at some low elevations along some roads and stuff. And the sheep wouldn’t use ‘em. So, it… when I got here, they’d basically discontinued that program. But then, I could see there was potential there. It just needed a little refinement… on filling the habitat equation of providing more water. And we started airlifting, and hauling stuff, a little higher up the mountain, and building water catchments. And even selecting a site where maybe you had a slick rock area, a real smooth washed area, with a pothole at the bottom of it. That maybe just ephemerally held water. But the sheep would know that. So, if you go out there, and there’s a natural rock pocket that in a good time would hold water, if you build a big facility there that will hold, you know, thousands 16
of gallons of water, your odds are gonna really jump up that sheep are going to find that facility, lock in on it, and use it, you know. And develop a little local population over you… off your rain catchments you built. And we did. We got… I’ve built 24 of em since I’ve been here. And I think I’ve got… one that I didn’t see a real positive response from the sheep. And our sheep populations have declined, even though we’ve built all these waters. But… and so, there’s some segments of the society that say ‘hey, you know, you haven’t done any good by expanding the availability of waterholes, as far as increasing your sheep population.’ But that’s unfair to say that, because there’s a lot of variables out there that has affected this population that I don’t have control over. Predation. Disease. Low lamb survival. Whatever the cause of that may be. Those are the factors that have caused the population to decline. And, in those areas where we have built our water catchments, and the sheep have came in and found it, and set up a little subpopulation there, then them are some of our best herds - remnant herds - that didn’t suffer the declines that the more traditional subpopulations have – that were centered off of natural springs, where they were in high timbered areas. Where visibility was limited. Those are the populations – on the natural waters, that have taken the biggest hit. The sheep mountain range… high estimates in the ‘80s for around 1600 to 2000 sheep. Almost half that population was on the sheep range, where all the natural waters are. That population has had a… has declined from the 1000, roughly, down to 200 animals. And that’s what… and we’ve… and where the natural waters are. These other ranges, where we’ve went in and added waters, they haven’t sustained the population declines that the sheep range have. So, I’m a believer in it. I think you can overdo it. I think a sheep is an animal that, on every mountain range it populates, it wants areas that it will use in the summer, and then it wants an area in the wintertime. I have to explain to you -- sheep don’t eat or drink …he only drinks about three months a year. And when they disperse from a waterhole, they should be able to go to an area that’s devoid of water. ‘Cause, if it’s devoid of water, then there’s been no sheep there earlier in the summer depleting the forage base. They’re going to an area that some… an animal like a mountain lion, that’s not as hardy as they are, can’t follow them into that dry country. ‘Cause they can’t go all winter without a drink. So, you need to have an area set aside in every mountain range that is sheep winter range. That’s devoid of water. That hasn’t been foraged on all year long. That’s incapable of supporting a lion population. Chances are its lower, so its snower free. So they don’t have to deal with the inclement weather in the winter time. So, I’m not a proponent of sprinkling water from one end of a mountain range to the other. I’m a proponent of going in there, where you have good… what appears to you good summer habitat, and developing water there, so you can build a population there. And expand on your total for the refuge. But yet, leaving certain sections of that mountain range devoid of water, for the reasons I just listed. And that’s a hard thing that we have with our sportsmen. They see the positive results of building water. ‘Hey, there’s lots of sheep there. So if we build more water, we’ll have more sheep. If we build more water, will lead us to have even more sheep. So then more sheep more sheep is a better – better - better thing. But they don’t look at the big picture, you know. You can have too… you can over populate an area. Then you can have a terrible population decline. You can have no escape area 17
from predators, ‘cause everywhere they go the wild predators have a water source. So we got to look at the big picture, you know. The whole life history of that animal. He didn’t grow up in an environment - a desert environment - where there’s water around every turn, in the mountain. He grew up in an environment where there was localized water sources, and then in other areas there wasn’t any. That’s the type of terrain, or habitat, he’s adapted to. And you’re just trying to mimic that. And by going in a totally dry area, you can mimic what occurs in a mountain range that had some water and some dry area. But you don’t want… I… and I you can get to ‘em. You just have to sit down like you and I are talking now, and explain, you know, kind of what the life cycle is. And flooding an area with water is not necessarily always a good thing.
Interviewer – I see.
Bruce Zeller – I kind of round-a-bouted that, but I think you understood what I said.
Interviewer – Yeah, totally. That taught me… I didn’t think about that.
Bruce Zeller – Assimilate what you’ve learned, and present it to your peers, or… I don’t know…
Interviewer – That’s good. I think you just said it.
Bruce Zeller – Yeah.
Interviewer – Yeah, how do you assimilate, you know, all the things that you’ve learned here… is this written down somewhere? Have you kind of a… I know, I saw you taking detailed notes the other day, you know, is that how you bring the data back and kind of… for future use and historical record…?
Bruce Zeller – Yeah. I’ve done a good job of keeping track of what we’ve done in terms of water development, and some of the use patterns that I’ve observed after we’ve completed the projects. And put that into our file system. So that my replacement can go back and look at that and see what worked or didn’t work. Or how well it worked, if it did work. And that’s the kind of information that hasn’t been shared that well with the academic community. I think that’s why we’re seeing a lot of push from some NGOs like the Wilderness Society, that are opposed to anything artificial out there. They’re saying, you know, ‘sheep have survived for centuries without man-made water catchments. Why is it so important that we do that now, and disturb the landscape?’ as a… me as a person, and desert biologist, desert sheep biologists as a whole, have not done a good job of taking the results of our water development, the positive aspect of it, putting it into a format, and got it out to the public – whether it be the Wilderness Society or anyone else – and strongly demonstrating what the benefits can be. Because, they only look at the historical records of sheep. And they see that there’s not that many more today than there was at the turn of the century. Even though we’ve all built these water catchments. So then, it appears, that they’ve made no difference. But of course, a lot of other things have happened in the last 100 years, besides water sources being piped off for mining, or urban development, or 18
whatever. So they had… a lot of water sources have made a definite impact, as far as maintaining populations in Nevada and Arizona and the other southwestern states. And we’ve not been doing a good job of convincing the folks that oppose that strategy of the positive aspects of that. And it’s always something that is just a personal pet peeve of mine. And I realize that were dwelling a lot on water, but, you know, you always… that’s why I like to say man-made water catchment rather than artificial water catchment. Because water’s not an artificial component of a habitat. Water is not like… methamphetamine, you know. Water occurs in nature. It’s a natural component out there. We may have artificially affected its distribution, or its availability, in terms of quantities of gallons available. But water is not an artificial component of wildlife habitat. There are very few species of wildlife that don’t require water as being a part of habitat component. It all goes back to water, food, shelter, and space, you know. Water is not an artificial component of that habitat. We may affect its availability or distribution, but it’s not an artificial resource. Water does occur naturally in every mountain range in the southwest. It just may not be as abundant, or as widely distributed. But it’s still there. And it’s required by the critters that inhabit that area. So I… I’m really a… my hair stands on edge when people use the word ‘artificial.’ I know it’s… they’re just grabbing an adjective out of the air when they do that. But it’s one of those… I don’t think it’s an appropriate, it’s a man-made… it’s not an artificial… water’s not artificial. And then, as far as, just to get back, as far as the other data – it does get shared, well, like, our survey data. All the southwestern states have banded together, since 1956, and… or thereabouts, and formed a group called the Desert Bighorn Sheep Council. And every year, since… in the ‘50’s, they’ve got together… biologist from Arizona, California, Nevada, Utah, Texas, and assimilated all this survey data, from all the states, from the federal biologists and the state biologists. Put it together in a transaction form. So, the population data’s available there to establish the trends. The resource aspect, as far as capturing animals and relocating ‘em, whether those relocations were successful or unsuccessful. That was reported in the Desert Bighorn Councils. all the students that have done telemetry, sheep… telemetry work on desert bighorn sheep, the vast majority of them came to the Desert Bighorn Councils, and presented their findings from their research to the group, as a whole, and it was put in the Council transaction. So, you really… for desert sheep, it’s kind of unique. You don’t need to go on your internet site, if you were the new biologist here, and you had no experience working with desert sheep, and start researching what the critter requires – its life history and all that. Over in the office there’s the copies of the bighorn council transactions dating back to 1956. You start taking them home and reading ‘em. That information is there for you. I mean, it’s… as a species we’ve done a very good group collaboratively, between state and federal and nonprofit groups, getting together and assimilating that data.
Interviewer – You had talked a lot about the water and some of the controversy with… like the wilderness… strict… strict wilderness preservation standards, where the folks don’t want any alteration to a big habitat like that. Which is interesting, ‘cause it takes into account how big of a land mass were on. Because you really don’t have that in most other refuges, because they’re so 19
heavily managed. And some of them were never a wilderness resource to begin with. They were just a convenient spot. Now… I guess, how do you… what do you say to those folks who say, you know, this… since its proposed as wilderness, we shouldn’t have any of that on there. I mean, talk to me a little bit about that and kind of… I think it kind of… talk to me a little about your feelings on that, and the habitat issue, of why we put these water catchments in. And, like, the ethical issues. Go ahead.
Bruce Zeller – Yeah. That’s a good question. And, of course, my answer would be different to it than someone who was more of a wilderness oriented manager than myself. But, the way I answer the critics on that subject is, first of all, you’ve got to go back to the basics of refuge establishment. The refuge was established in 1936. And the purpose of the refuge, just as the Organic Act says, was the desert bighorn sheep. So our purpose and management should focus on those things that make that a more stable, secure population. That’s where the Service’s primary focus should be. Wilderness, to me, is a secondary objective. And it’s even hard for someone from a wilderness group to argue that point. That the area was established for sheep and we are going to do… I mean, if you’ve got hair enough to stand up in front of the group and say this, ‘we are going to take care of our sheep resource. Because that’s what we were established for. And then we’re… if we can improve this area by other means - by designating it as a wilderness and protecting other aspects of the ecology by doing that land designation - then we will do that as well. But our first and foremost priority is going to be managing the sheep. and then the second of all is that… the person who has a genuine interest in going into an area that is unaltered by man, and being in that area and having a true wilderness experience – where… still certainly has that capability. When you have 1.5 million acres, and I’ve got 25 water catchments out there… I’ve never done the math, but you figure… and these water catchments disturb an area roughly… let’s say 100 feet by 100 feet, when we build one. Twenty-four into a million and a half… there’s a 100 foot by 100 foot disturbed area in every 25 thousand acres of habitat out there. If that disrupts your wilderness experience, you had the very unfortunate experience to happen to stumble across the very canyon, or the very square foot of ground, that we went out and added water to enhance our sheep population. You shouldn’t have your wilderness experience altered - at all - by the work we’ve done. It’s more of a mindset. You… maybe the purist, he doesn’t even want to know that they’re out there. But, in terms of a physical disturbance to your experience, 25 100 by 100 foot sites on… and it’s actually a million point six acres now, since Clark County Conservation Act has passed… is not… should not, in my opinion, disturb your wilderness experience. Or should not have a very likelihood… very high likelihood of disturbing. And there’s different segments of your wilderness group. There are people who enjoy the wilderness experience and part of that experience is seeing the wildlife out there. ‘Cause it’s something they associate with the wilderness. That particularly part of wilderness purists might enjoy the fact they’re seeing sheep. And there was something man-made out there – they never saw it, but it enhanced their experience, because it added wildlife to the terrain they were going through. And then there’s another group that will tell you, you know, that the wildlife is… has… doesn’t add to the quality of my experience. I’m out there to see a 20
landscape that has no trails on it, no oil wells, no farm fields. Wildlife adds nothing to my experience. Well, my gut feeling is that the majority of people that enjoy a wilderness experience also enjoy wildlife in that habitat as they traverse it. And if what we’re doing out there is a pretty minor alteration, and it adds the wildlife component to their experience, it makes it more evaluable as a wilderness area – not less valuable.
Interviewer – What were some… what were the greatest challenges facing desert bighorns in the 1970’s? And what are those challenges today?
Bruce Zeller – Okay. In the ‘70’s, on the Refuge as a whole, we probably weren’t facing a great deal of challenge. We had relatively stable, high populations at that time. And, I think our challenge was to maintain that, that quality of habitat, you know. To not allow military activity to expand. To not allow public use to penetrate those areas that we were trying to set aside as sheep habitat. So I think our challenge was to maintain that. And I think we met that challenge alright. We were able to keep the area intact. It wasn’t started to spilt up for housing development or anything. We… the challenges we have today, I think, is that… is people are going to want to demand more access, more improved access. And now, with the growth of Las Vegas, and the water resources running out, they’re wanting to come out here, and drill our valleys, and pipe that water into Las Vegas – to support more business and more residential structures. And I think our challenge is to stop that. And also, a lot of our population decline is, in my opinion, is predator related on the sheep range. I didn’t think that initially, ‘cause if you read the literature, at least the stuff that was published early on, it pretty much indicated that lions did not prey heavily on sheep. That the deer was a primary prey base for those. but I think, as we saw some of the western deer herds decline in the 80’s, I think we saw some shift in predation patterns, on mountain lions. And, actually, shifts in their distributions as well. and the research that was conducted more recently has shown, pretty clearly now, that what we believed to be fact in the ‘50’s and ‘60’s – that lions weren’t a factor when it come to maintaining desert bighorn population viability – are. We’ve seen it in southern California, on the peninsular ranges. We’ve seen in the San Andres Range, in New Mexico. And I think we’ve seen it here in the Desert National Wildlife Range. After we experienced our declines, from the mid ‘80’s to the present time, we started doing a little reintroduction on the sheep range, thinking we could just possibly give it a shot in the arm and speed up that rebuilding process. And of course, those animals that we released there, we radio-collared a good sample. And I found that 50 percent of the mortalities of radio-collared sheep were due to mountain lions. Which was significant. Historically, mountain lion predation didn’t constitute that high of mortality factor. So I think it’s a challenge today getting over the… that hurdle. And it may [be] something that occurs naturally. I… the lions may eventually decline in their numbers, and the sheep expand theirs. And things go back to what they were in the mid ‘80’s, or prior to that time. But it’s a challenge not to go out there and do some control. I think you may reach a point, if things don’t turn around, you have to do it. Do some control. And I know that’s something that upper management doesn’t like to present to the public – that were gonna take the life of one animal for 21
the benefit of the other. Because people get upset when you talk about predator control. But, I think on a very selective basis, it may be something we have to do. You running low on tape?
End of Tape 2
Start of Tape 3
Interviewer – A people question for ya. Who were some of the more colorful refuge managers and, you know, any other personnel that you might have worked with at Desert? Any good people memories or things of that nature?
Bruce Zeller – I worked for some good managers early in my career – Bob Yoder, he was… had… was always colorful. He always thought it was easier to get forgiveness than it was permission, so…. Maybe it’s bad. I’ve kind of lived by that management strategy since I’ve been here. I haven’t gone out and announced at public meeting and stuff that we were gonna build a man-made water catchment up on the mountain range… or done a lot of paperwork. I could … my counterparts in the Division of Wildlife were doing it, having positive results, and I wanted to do it, and done it. I didn’t go out and ask permission to do it. I just done it. And I don’t… and I think I’ve had some good results. And it was good to manage by… easier to get forgiveness than it is permission sometimes. Now we have CCPs, and we’ve gone all into this planning phase, with public meetings. And we’ve been doing that for three years now. And we’re not any closer… much closer to getting our plan written, to me, than we were three years ago. And if we’d a had a problem that we wanted to address back in those days, that we knew the answer to, and went through the process that we are now, we never would have got out there and fixed that problem. We’d still be hashing in over. And Dave Brown. He was the Refuge Manager after Bob Yoder. And very hard working; very supportive; very good at keeping attuned to what was going on at all the different stations. Just an outstanding… in my opinion, just an outstanding manager. He’d worked in the field. I’m not exactly sure what his previous duty stations were, but he’d gone out of the refuges and went into the Regional Office, and was the Associate… Deputy Associate Manager, and had that regional experience. And then came back to the field to end his career. He was just so balanced. And such a hard worker, and supportive of what his staff was doing. And… just an outstanding manager. And, you know, when he went to work, he started at eight in the morning and he worked every minute of the day ‘til quitting time, you know. I’d watch him sit there at his desk and eat his lunch and continue to work through his lunch hour. and if you needed help, even with the paper stuff, why, you know, if you were trapping sheep or something, and you didn’t have time to write an inventory plan or something, and he had a little free time, he’d pick up a pencil and a pad of paper and start writing the [indecipherable] inventory plan, or whatever some other regional office or Washington office was saying was due. He’d help you, you know. If I was pouring concrete he’d come out and help me. But, yet, he had enough… a background, he could go back into the office and do the administrative stuff, too. Just an outstanding manager. I don’t know as I ever worked for anybody… or with anybody, that was really what I’d call a character, you know, one of these 22
really… guys that just tickles your humor, or does something just off the wall. Not since I’ve been here. Everybody’s just been pretty straight up, honest, hard working people. They didn’t have any personality qualities that made ‘em… kind of stand out in a crowd. I suppose… I’ve had… different people that I’ve met working here, you know, just some of guides, some of the stories they would tell, and some of their experiences was pretty interesting. But, I was hearing it secondhand. It was interesting to me, but it… to pass on in this interview it probably wouldn’t mean much to the next guy.
Interviewer – Alright. How have the… how have the neighbors and… you know, that’s a bad term…
Bruce Zeller – Yeah. [chuckles]
Interviewer – … residents of Las Vegas I guess, or whoever you consider to be a neighbor of the refuge, how have they viewed Desert over the years?
Bruce Zeller – It’s… the local community really isn’t all that aware of our existence. Our public profile, or image, is still really low. They still think Fish and Wildlife Service is no different than the BLM. I mean, it’s not uncommon, to this very day, to go out and talk to a visitor and they’ll ask you, you know, what’s out on this BLM land, or… you know, or to be called a ranger instead of a biologist, you know, the old Park Service terminology for someone who works with the resources. And our visitor use is still, in terms of what the population is in the valley, very low. So, our rate at which we’re spreading information about the Refuge or the Fish and Wildlife Service is far below the growth rate of the valley. And were trying to change that. we’ve hired a recreational planner, but that particular person hasn’t had the opportunity to go out and interface at the high school level, or the community level, and get our message out to the public, yet. And our visitor facility here isn’t the kind that… the little visitor contact station with a kiosk , isn’t the kind that would draw ‘em in so they could self educate themselves. And it’s definitely an area that we need to work at. I think we have to work at it smart. I don’t think we just want to go to town and advertise the fact that we’ve got this beautiful, untouched area out there, and tell everybody to fire up their dirt bikes and their SUVs and come out and see what we’ve got to offer. I think we want to bring people out and teach ‘em about the area… under controlled conditions that are suitable to getting the message out and preserving the habitat both. And it’s a challenge, you know. We’re dealing in the age where people want instant gratification. They don’t want to have to hike any distance to see a sheep. They want to be able to drive out, click their digital camera, gather that image immediately, and get back to town to their dvd player, or whatever electronic entertainment that they enjoy. Or go play a slot machine, or whatever. It’s a challenge, you know. We… were not… were dealing with a different cliental than we were… even 20 years ago, where a lot… a higher percentage of our public users came from an outdoor, hunting / fishing background, or a farming background. Or they were used to getting out working up a big sweat to accomplish their task. We don’t… were not dealing with quite the same the cliental that has that mentality anymore. They… shoot, 23
there’s a lot of folks could less if they ever saw a desert bighorn sheep. They might be very important to them, in terms of their peace of mind. They like to go to bed at night knowing that the wild animals are secure as they are when they go to bed in their own home. Because they think they’re one of God’s creatures, and they should be allowed to coexist. But so many of ‘em are perfectly content, even though they are concerned about the animal, learn from it from watching Discovery Channel, they don’t have to see it first hand to enjoy it. They just want to know it’s protected. And they want to know it’s out there in case they ever want to go out and see it, or when their grandkids want to see, it it’s still there. But to physically do it themselves is maybe not important to this generation and it was to previous generations.
Interviewer – What are you most proud of? From your 26 years working here? If you have something that you can even touch on for that. I know that….
Bruce Zeller – I think I’m most proud of the work – the hands on work, as a whole, that we’ve done. The water development. We’ve done some translocations of sheep. We’ve re-established sheep in the Spotted Mountain Range where there was no population when I got here. And now we have viable population over there. Some of the research findings – they were good results, but they weren’t pioneering stuff. Others had found similar result as a result of doing telemetry relocations. So, and again, of developing a good working relationship with what I call the serious outdoor community. And my partners at the federal level and the state level. Particularly the Nevada Department of Wildlife – the state level. We’ve always just worked very well together. I mean, I’ve had periods where I was doing surveys and I couldn’t get another staff person to fly with me, to record data. I could call them and they would come fly with me. And… or if I need somebody to help sling water materials to a water site, one of those guys would come and help me. And then, when they needed help, I helped them. I’ve flown all over southern Nevada, off the Refuge, on weekends, building water holes, and… out monitoring sheep populations ,and helping trap animals off the Refuge, you know. And lending what little expertise I had to the operation. And, you know… it’s… desert sheep in the southwest, it’s definitely one of those things, you know, you get out of it what you put into it. If you help other people, they’ll help you. And that’s happened, you know. I’ve helped them, and they’ve turned around and helped me. And I think the resource is better off for it. And I definitely want to see my replacement maintain them relationships, because the net result is the resource gets positive benefits. You know, two people working together can accomplish more than one person. And my efforts working with the NGOs, and the state folks, you know. I’ve got some pretty nice awards for that. And I’m not much of an award person. I don’t like to be the center of attention. But I will say, about the awards that I’ve got from the Fraternity, it’s more gratifying to get them from somebody who doesn’t even work with you, on a daily basis in the agency, than it is a Fish and Wildlife Service award. Because, sometimes in the Fish and Wildlife Service, it seems like, well, if you give one staff member an award, then maybe next year you award the other staff members. It’s just… sometimes they’re given to keep harmony. There may not be necessarily always given for outstanding work. But if you’re being recognized by your peers outside your 24
own agency, then, and that means to me, that they appreciate what you do and all your efforts and all that. Had a waterhole named after me – off the Refuge. And I recently received an award – the President’s Award – from the Fraternity, for 25 years of dedicated service to the desert bighorn sheep. And I can go to northern Nevada, where another NGO – the Nevada Bighorns Unlimited – and talk to their membership. And they’re… always want to thank me for what I do, for something that they care about. So, it’s been good. It’s good. Times have changed, and it’s time to go on, you know. But… I’ve no complaints.
Interviewer – That’s great. What was, or is, your greatest frustration? Maybe I should have said the other one first. I don’t want to get you high and then bring you down. [Laughs]
Bruce Zeller – Yeah. I… you know, my greatest frustrations have just really come in recent years. And that is that I realize that the agency, as a whole, is getting pressure from the top of the government – from the President, from Congress – to do a better job of getting our message out to the public. Doing outreach. Providing our elected officer’s constituents more services. And I agree with that. , we need to provide them with more outdoor recreational opportunity where we have the opportunity to do so. And more educational information, and everything. But in the process of doing that, now we have project leaders, and those in the regional offices, that are so attuned to Washington Fish and Wildlife Service requests, and Congressional requests, to maintain their quality step increases and everything that you get at that level of management, you’re having to bend over backwards to appease these demands for outreach and environmental education and expanded recreational opportunities. And were losing sight of what our original mission was. That, you know, we’re still here for the resource. Like the Organic Act says. That wildlife is number one. And that’s where our budget, and our time, at least the majority of our time, should go. And I don’t see that. I see maybe ten percent of the Fish and Wildlife Service’s effort going towards habitat, and actual physical habitat improvement. And inventory. And the other 90 percent is to provide information – whether it regards the other things I just mentioned, the outreach, or whether it’s just administrative information we’re providing to OMB, you know, where are our dollars going. The new A B C Program. The new Ideas Program. The new CCP planning process. SAMs program. I mean, we’ve got people, now, spending half the year just taking training so they’ll be able to implement, and the other 50 percent of the year, of these new programs. And I know we need to be responsive, you know, in terms of telling the public and Congress where were spending our dollars. But the process can’t become so cumbersome that you spend all your time recording the flow of money and justifying it, ‘til all the money is actually used on people to prepare the reports. None of it’s spent on materials, or actual habitat improvements. I’ve seen something come out of the… I don’t know whether it was a Refuge Directors email, or what, that they’d hired, like, 590 some new refuge employees. Or new Fish and Wildlife Service employees, over the last couple of years. And, like, 500 of them had gone to the field to do… I don’t think them numbers were pulled out of the… I don’t where they pulled them numbers out. I don’t see people out in the field doing habitat, or inventory… habitat management, or inventorying 25
species. I see people reporting to Congress; sitting in CCC planning meetings; meeting with the water districts; fighting over water resources. There’s just a handful of people that… still out there on the ground, actually trying to do the day to day operations, that we’ve done for all these years. And I don’t think we’re putting our money where our mouth is. I don’t think were being honest to Congress. I don’t think all them dollars are going for the resource. I think they’re going for writing new budget programs and teaching people how to run ‘em….
Interviewer – What advice would you give to other Fish and Wildlife Service biologists? I guess that means now on in the future.
Bruce Zeller – My advice – if you wanted to be a biologist, would be not to come… a field level biologist, not to go to work for this agency. That’d be my advice. It depends on your personality. If you’re more diversified person – you enjoy interacting with the public, during coordination meetings; you enjoy some time spent at the field level doing inventories; you enjoy some time on report preparation… environmental assessments. If you like that sort of type of work, where you’re diversified between the paperwork, the hands on, and everything in between – come to work for this agency. But if you’re… oh, our maintenance man uses the term all the time, if you’re a dinosaur, if you still just want to spent 90 percent of your time out there working either with the animals or the habitat, or even on stuff that directly supports inventories or habitat improvement, then I suggest you wouldn’t want to come to work for Fish And Wildlife Service. Because, we’re not an agency that’s headed in that direction. We’re an agency that headed in the direction of outsourcing that type of work. were so busy reporting our efforts to congress, or to upper management, and recording our day to day operations – on outreach budget expenditures, equipment maintenance, pubic use activity, and all this – all these fields unrelated to actual habitat or wildlife management. And you just wouldn’t want to come… you’re just… you’re not going to have the opportunity… I… the new biologist is not going to have the opportunity I did. He’s going to have all these other things thrown on his plate. And his supervisor expects him to clear his plate of those tasks. And once he does, then he’s going to have the opportunity to go out and do the things that he dreamed about when he was a college student. Well, by the time he clears the plate of all those tasks that he’s been assigned, his hours in the field are going to be damn limited... I mean… even the technology aspect of it, you know, now, where you’re doing GIS and those types of planning… electronic planning report, takes a lot of training and office time to generate that type of information, you know. GIS is wonderful, when all the data is plugged in and you have these layers of information out there, from vegetation to distribution of mammals, and distribution of birds, and recreational activities. It’s a wonder planning tool. But that GIS specialists… it’s very labor intensive for that person to go in there and actually input all that data and turn out a report… in a readable format. and I know were hiring people specifically to do that, but still, it takes time, on the biologists part, just to gather that information before he feeds it to the other person to synthesize. I would work for a state agency, you know, they’re still more of a… but even them, you know, they’re not exempt from it either. Their biologists are spending a lot of time in meetings and synthesizing their 26
budgets for next year’s funding, and all that stuff. It’s a sign of the times. We’re just becoming a more… I don’t know, not really more bureaucratic, were just becoming more accountable for actions. So we’re spending so much time inputting the information, or designing programs to input information into, so that we can be responsive to anybody that asks the question, you know.
Interviewer – Did you feel that… with the late bloom in technology itself on this refuge, and how isolated you were, do you think you were shielded from that push? I mean, it seems like a lot of that has been going on for a while but….
Bruce Zeller – You’re right, I was very much shielded from it. Because we didn’t have the phone line, and I couldn’t put a mapping program in there where I could type in lats and longs and coordinates and all that. I didn’t have to spend a lot of my time putting the data into an electronic format. I just… was a handwritten or typed format that was stuck in a file folder, and I could do that very quickly. And then go out and gather more data or…. Yeah, that’s true. Very true. I’ve been… actually we’ve been in that mode for quite a while, I’m just now being pulled into that mode – dragging and kicking, at the very terminus of my career. [Chuckles]
Interviewer – Have they been trying to get you into that for a while? You kinda used the… here’s how I’ve been doing it and it’s worked so far [indecipherable]
Bruce Zeller – Not so much that strategy. ‘Cause I could see the method to the madness, learning some of the techniques. Particularly like what I was dwelling on there - the GIS stuff. And I know they wanted to send me back to NCTC to go through GPS training to increase my skills, so that we could start plotting sheep locations and other data into a GIS format. We don’t have a GP… we can’t afford a good GPS unit right now, like a Trimble or something. And we don’t have the time to go out and carry the unit around and map out the boundaries of the certain vegetative type, or whatever layer of data that were trying to put in it. By the time I went there and got the training, and come back, I’d be retired. I mean, it’s a waste of my time to go there, get the training, and then come back and wait three or four years to get the equipment and the time that’s necessary to go out and do it. I’m better off, in that month, just staying here and doing things the old way, you know.
Interviewer – Also, if someone had to go, out on the ground, I don’t know if this is how you do it, I don’t know that much about GPS, or GIS, both of them, but, if you have to walk around and physically push that button every time to delineate vegetation and sheep and whatnot, this is 1.5 million acres.
Bruce Zeller – Right.
Interviewer – It seems like that would be an army of people doing that. 27
Bruce Zeller – That’s right. You actually need to have, not only the funding to get the personnel, but you need aircraft and all kinds of stuff. Like they’re doing on the fire program, when they have a burn, you know. They got the helicopter under contract, and they’re flying the perimeter of that burn with an on-board GPS unit. It’s not something that you can just, in an acreage this size, go out with a hand held unit, and map out all these different data layers. It… it’s… it won’t work.
Break in taping
Interviewer – I guess all the above.
Bruce Zeller – I think we’ve covered the bases pretty good.
Interviewer – Yeah.
Bruce Zeller – I don’t know. The only thing… there we were talking, as we come off the mountain today, about some of the tasks that we… some of the older personnel have done over the years, that maybe were… I don’t know… if unappreciated is the right word. I think our efforts have always been appreciated. I’ve always felt like they have been. Under-evaluated, in terms of the hazards, you know. When… historically a lot of areas have been blessed with very small staffs, and I am certainly not the only person in the Fish and Wildlife Service that has experienced where you had to fight fires one day, and run heavy equipment the next, and strap on you gun belt and go approach a visitor who wasn’t following the rules and guidelines, and maybe the fourth day get up in a helicopter and fly at low elevation –in mountainous terrain – and get bounced around like a ping pong ball – and hope you didn’t bounce off a cliff wall somewhere, you know. Personally, I don’t think that… because of the retirement system favoring just the fire personnel and the law enforcement personnel – because their jobs are hazardous, they get an added benefit in terms of percent of retirement, in terms of when they can leave. Being allowed to leave a little earlier in their career. I think, most of the people on these stations with small staffs have… they’ve done it ‘cause they enjoyed it. And I’d do it all again. But, in the process of doing it, they’ve kind of put their health and safety on the line a lot of times. And the Service has never really acknowledged that, you know. I’ve been in a helicopter crash. I’ve been on equipment that’s, you know, tipped up. Fortunately, didn’t tip over. I’ve had to approach refuge visitors who were drunk, or obnoxious when they had law enforcement authority to deal with, and that situation. And I don’t know as… we as jack-of-all-trades that have done that in our career, deserve maybe the same benefit that a fire or a full time LE person. But I think we’ve done a lot of things that you couldn’t ask just general members of the public to do, on a routine basis, and get ‘em to do it. We’ve had a cadre of people that were willing to put their all into doing a job, that was, at times, hazardous to our health and safety. And when we got invited, kinda by the Flirt Team, to put our applications in for [indecipherable – for 6C?] coverage, and the Service didn’t even really acknowledge that we even, potentially, had a valid claim, you know. They just started rubber stamping ‘em as, you know, as ‘reject’ ‘reject.’ I 28
thought it was handled very poorly. They could have denied our claims and done it in a less… offensive way. I don’t know. I don’t want to cry sour grapes, ‘cause I don’t feel like I’ve been abused at all in my career. I think I’ve been very fortunate to be allowed to do the things that I’ve done, and given that opportunity. And I’m not gonna criticize those that gave me that opportunity. I just… I think, there’s some areas they could have improved, but it wasn’t that big a deal. [chuckles]
Interviewer – Alright. Well, heck. Okay. And this has been August 23, 2004, the life and time of Bruce Zeller. Thank you, Bruce.
Bruce Zeller – [Laughs] You’re welcome.